he event is a lesson for conservatives, whether they be scripture touting ones or not.  In a world that is ideologically driven, the real significance of things is easily lost in favor the art of putting the desired spin on things.  And conservatives can be just as bad in this regard as anyone else.  For many conservatives the decision by the German Judge Christa Datz-Winter reveals what is wrong with a society that gives too much weight to Islam.  Regrettably, their outrage expresses no more than an ideological bias, since the issue of equality between women and men is one that raises its ugly head among all religious groups of the monotheistic tradition.  Fortunately, then, the deeper insight to be gleamed here has nothing whatsoever to do with Islam as such.

For conservatives who make a fuss about taking sacred texts literally, there is the very real issue of the absurdity of doing so in some instances.  Consider, for example, that the thesis that “sin is sin”, no matter what it is.  Well, according to this view, there is no difference between robbing the elderly of their life’s savings and stealing $2.00 from one of the many jars of change that the family keeps around the house, giving no thought as to how much change there is really is; for they do not need the money. 

Obviously, there is all the difference in the world between these two forms of stealing.  Neither is to be condoned, but one warrants a level of moral outrage that the other does not.  And there is no getting around this reality, although ne’er a scripture anchors the difference.  And this is to say nothing of the difference between, say, murdering a person and stealing $2.00 from the many jars of change that the family keeps around the house.

Religion shorn of commonsense is a disaster. 

The Qur’an (4:34) does in fact have a passage that licenses a husband’s beating of his wife, even if there can be much quibbling over how severe the beating should be.  Indeed, the version of the Qur’an that I own has in parenthesis that the beating should be light, not causing any physical harm.  This should hardly occasion a sigh of relief.  In any case, though, the point is that neither Jews nor Christians can take any delight in this, precisely because their sacred texts are full of quite awkward passages and admonitions. 

The Christian text has some quite scornful things to say about Jews.  Judaism, of course, does not talk about either Christianity or Islam (because it precedes either).  Yet, its scared text is full of passages about menstruation and what kind of material can be worn with what that boggle the mind. 

So to the religious of whatever persuasion, the first lesson to be learnt from what just happened in Germany is that no religious commitment should preclude commonsense.  And it is a simple fact that our commonsense evolves (or should) as it becomes more informed by, for instance, human psychology. 

Let me turn, now, to the issue of women in particular.  The essential question is this: Did the sacred texts (and pick the text of our favorite monotheistic religion) claim that women and men are equal but different?  Or, did they claim not only that women and men are different, but that this difference warrants a subordination on the part of one vis à vis the other—a subordination of women to men? 

I think that if one is honest, it will have to be acknowledged that what we get is not just difference but a claim of subordination on the part of women.  One of my most memorable experiences in Israel, during one of my trips there, involved attending a synagogue service where only the women were called to read Torah.  Indeed, the entire service was conducted by women.  What a difference ! ! !

All that talk about it being the honor of women to instruct the children of the family is very nice.  But it does not even come close to having the experience of ascending to the bema to read a Torah portion.  And I can see no reason whatsoever to think that one experience replaces the other, however important either might be.

Christianity has its roots in Judaism and Islam has its roots in both.  There is simply no reason whatsoever to think that either gave rise to only the equal but different conception of women and men. 

Of course, intellectual gymnastics is possible with each of the three monotheistic religions.  But that is just the point.  One has to work very, very, very hard to get a rendering of either one of the three monotheistic religious traditions according to which women and men are entirely equal but merely different.  And by the time one finishes working that hard, it seems to me that one has conceded the point that the religion does warrant a subordination of women to men.  Otherwise, one imagines that there would be at least one rather explicit passage to the effect that in the eyes of God women and men are both equal in every respect and should be treated as such in all walks of life.  The fact that one must engage in intellectual somersaults to get anything remotely resembling precisely that claim suggests that the claim is not there in the first place. 

Notice the difference between saying that “In the eyes of God all are equal in every respect” and saying that “In the eyes of God women and men are both equal in every respect”.  Does the first claim entail the second?  Well, it depends on how one reads “All”.  The second claim, however, does not require “a reading” in the first place.  And that simple fact is not trivial.  If I were giving a lecture to an audience of Arabs and Jews, I would not just say that “All are equal”.  But I would think it absolutely appropriate to say at least once “All are equal: Arabs and Jews” precisely because I would want to invoke the universal in order to affirm explicitly the particular groups in the audience. 

Sophisticated and ingenious contextual readings are fine.  However, if truth be told it is often the case that they merely reveal what our commitments are in the first place. 

Ayyub Axel Köhler, head of the Central Council of Muslims in Germany, claimed that Qur’an passage is out of date because the Prophet Mohammed is the example for Muslims and he never struck a woman.  While perhaps convenient for the moment, it is quite inconvenient generally, since the Prophet in fact did lots of things that I hope no Muslim would ever think to do.  Besides what exactly are we to understand?  Were it true that Mohammed had struck a woman, would such behavior be morally permissible?  Morally required? 

There can be little doubt that nowadays we understand equality between the sexes in a way that was very nearly inconceivable many centuries ago.  And the exceptions prove the rule.  A millennium ago, not a soul doubted that the sun existed.  But it would not have occurred to anyone to think that the earth went around it.  Everyone quite “naturally” thought that the sun went around the earth. 

With the sexes, the biological differences between women and men were held to be of such paramount importance that reality itself was overshadowed, thus licensing the view that women at their very best cannot equal the intellectual power of which men at their very best are capable.  Again, the exceptions prove the rule.  Hence, it was only “natural” for men to be physicians and women to be nurses.

This suggests that blind faith is not a virtue.  Why?  Because blind faith is rather like an ideology.  Reality does not matter.  It is this truth that conservatives of whatever religious persuasion have not taken seriously. 

Faith at its best inspires us to be our best.  It does not commit us to a reality that has no basis in the facts.  What the facts are can, of course, be a matter of great dispute for generations.  But when the facts are clear, there is nothing at all virtuous about a faith that ignores those facts. 

The mistake of the German judge lied in exhorting religious tradition above facts where clear harm is involved.  Let the judge’s folly in this regard serve as a lesson to us all. 

or many, the idea of God’s existence flounders with the problem of evil.  You know the argument: How could an omniscient, omni-benevolent, and omnipotent God have created creatures, namely us human beings, who are capable of committing so much evil?  And the argument that human beings possess freewill does not seem to cut it.  After all, God has freewill and He does commit evil.  So why didn’t he create human beings who are rather like himself: equally free but not in the least bit inclined to commit evil? 

Significantly, I am one of the few theists who does not quite hold that God is omnipotent.  And I actually think that the Bible itself lends some credence to this line of thought.  Recall the story of Job, where Satan challenges God.  It is striking that God does not just do away with Satan.  And in the New Testament, we are told that Satan is ultimately punished.  But once more, God does not just do away with Satan.  Of course, I am not God.  But I have always thought that if I were He, the existence of Satan would surely come to an end.  There would be no point in keeping around the very embodiment of evil, namely Satan himself.

But I want to talk about an entirely different matter in this blog-entry.  As is well-known, theology has always had some difficulty with human sexuality.  Every now and then I think to myself that if there is one kind of behavior more than any other that supports the view that human beings are creatures of evolution, it is the behavior of sex itself.

The issue is not that of being a prude about sex.  No, like any psychologically healthy being, I think to myself: Sex is good.  What I find intriguing, from the standpoint of a divine being bringing this sort of thing about, is how it all works.

Sex involves those body-parts that are used for the elimination of bodily waste.  And if one supposes that oral sex has much to commend it, then we end up with the quite fascinating arrangement where the body-part that is used for food consumption and the body-part that is used for the elimination of bodily waste make for a most marvelous coupling. 

What?  How could a being understood as holy through and through—one taken to be holy in every possible way—have conceived of human beings in this way?  Surely, the argument from efficiency won’t do: “We have got these parts here for the elimination of bodily waste, we need to put them to further use; otherwise, they are being under-utilized.  So let’s facilitate a most fortuitous connection between this body part and the body part that is used for food consumption.”

Take deep kissing.  A defining feature of it is the exchange of spit.  It is amazing, is it not, just how much it matters how we describe things.  For if someone were to say “Here, I have got some spit, would you take it?,” we would surely suppose that the person is either joking or a complete idiot.  This is so even between lovers.  Nobody wants to be handed a cup of spit upon returning home.  And the explanation for this most surely is not that “It’s cold”, as we would not warm up to drinking our lover’s spit if it were heated up in the microwave, say  ! ! ! 

Yet, deep kissing is about exchanging spit if it is about anything at all.  No one claims that she or he has found a way to enjoy all the physical effects of deep kissing all the while avoiding all the spit. 

So once again: Just how is that an entirely holy being managed to create a human body that is given to this sort of behavior?

Animals, of course, are a non-issue.  They do not have a conception of themselves.  Certainly, sanitation as we understand it does not exist among animals, as the animal behavior of licking themselves clean makes abundantly clear. 

No doubt every human parent has used a little spit to remove a spot of a child’s face.  No such parent, however, has supposed that a spit-bath via the tongue would be the way to clean a child’s entire body.  Nor again do we think to clean ourselves in this way.  And guess what, this should come as no surprise.  Why?  Because we typically think of using our mouths to clean various areas of the body downright repulsive. 

With sex, then, we do with our mouths under one description that which under a different description, namely washing our bodies, we would deem to be absolutely repulsive if we used our mouths. 

From the standpoint of how we use our body parts, evolution makes infinitely more sense than the idea of a divine being fashioning the human body.  Built into evolution is a certain level of efficiency.  So it is not at all out of the question that some of the same body-parts might be used for both the elimination of bodily waste and intimate sexual behavior.  And as mere animals, the issue of spit as such is a non-issue. 

I have just mentioned the word “intimate”.  And this further perplexes me from the standpoint of the human body being fashioned by God. 

Nowadays, of course, it is understood by all save those afflicted with some form of moral rigor mortis that the height of intimacy occurs with sexual behavior.  But intimacy thus understood is a form of deep, deep affirmation.  It is a profound psychological act whereby we eliminate boundaries in order to achieve a depth of affirmation that cannot be achieved otherwise.  Under this description sex is most majestic.  And the idea of two beings becoming one, via the act of sex, waxes rhapsodic in our mind. 

Alas, this ever so rhapsodic act almost seems to require a kind of schizophrenia on our part; and this is precisely because it involves the use of body-parts about which we conceive of as having quite radically different functions: the elimination of bodily waste, on the one hand, and food consumption, on the other. 

It is difficult to imagine that an omniscient being thinking: “I have got it.  I have got a way to take human intimacy to unparalleled heights.  All we have to do is have the body-parts that are used for the elimination of bodily waste and the body-parts that are used for food consumption operate in tandem with one another during sex.” 

This may reveal a failure of my imagination—a profound form of mental fatigue.  But I keep thinking to myself that a divine being whose powers are without limit would have hit upon a quite different approach to human intimacy.  I mean, if God indeed fashioned human beings in the way that we are, one has to ask: What was He thinking when He thought about human intimacy?” 

So when I reflect upon the history of ideas, it is no mystery to me that some of the great religious thinkers had so much difficulty reconciling human sexual behavior with idea that human beings were fashioned by a holy being who possesses all power.  It is not much that they were prudes, as it is often thought nowadays.  Rather, it is that rightly saw how difficult it is to make sense of the idea that God himself created human beings with the very thought that the body parts should have the radically dual function that they have.  When one tries to makes sense of it all, one quite naturally asks: “What, on earth or in heaven’s name, was He thinking?” 

Evolution, by contrast, is not a thinking entity.  It is not an entity at all.  It is a mindless process.  So the radically dual-function of bodily parts is no challenge to its efficacy at all, except that it is astounding that the majesty of it all operates only among human beings. 

Is it right to suppose that God ought to have produced a quite different kind of human being?  Or, do we once more resort to “this is one of the mysteries of God?”  Alternatively, one could argue that the dual functionality of body-parts speaks to the extraordinary majesty of God, as it seems woefully unlikely that we human beings would have designed ourselves in this way.  But then talk of we human beings designing ourselves is already just so much nonsense, which might also be the case with this blog-entry.

f course, I need not tell you that professors are human, too.  What I want to draw attention to, however, is one aspect of that humanity, namely the tendency to become bitter.  What might occasion bitterness on a professor’s part?  The answer is quite simple: The failure to achieve the academic heights dreamed about in graduate school.  Anyone professor who attended a high-powered graduate program dreamed of one day becoming one of the major trend-setters in her or his field: the subject of untold dissertations, journal articles, and even the chapters of books. 

The academic world is an exceedingly competitive one, however; and most graduate students—even from high-powered graduate program—never go on to become one of the trend-setters in their field—a superstar in the field, as we say.  And it is this reality that is very fertile soil for the growth of bitterness on the part of professors.

Rather than accepting the fact that she or he will not become a major trend-setter in her or his field, the professor aches over the fact and starts blaming one thing or person and then another.  Worse, the professor may even fail to acknowledge that things are nonetheless going rather well in her or his career, although she or he is not a trend-setter.  After all, the choice is not to be a superstar or nothing at all.

Imagine, for example, someone—call him John—owning an Audi but wanting a Mercedes so badly that he does not appreciate the fact that he has an Audi which, after all, is a quite decent car.  Indeed, it not just that John is unhappy with his Audi, but it also the case that he looks down on anyone else who owns an Audi. 

Professors who become bitter owing to the failure to realize their dream of being a trend-setter, a superstar in their field, are rather like John the Audi owner whom I have just described.

Bitterness is crippling because it invariably gives rise to a failure to use the gifts that one does have in a more effective manner.  This is because one is too busy bemoaning the fact that one is not a superstar in one’s field to do that.  Indeed, the bitter person would rather hold on to anger than let it go in order to achieve a greater good.  Bitterness, then, becomes its own security blanket—an every ready justification for not seeing something in a more positive light. 

To state the obvious: Bitterness is to life what rust is to metal, in that both are absolutely corrosive.  Rust destroys a metal’s tensile strength; whereas bitterness is an ever present impediment to the will to do that which is good.  Thus, a bitter person can be suspicious of pristine innocence itself. 

As I reflect upon the university, it has occurred to me (perhaps as an epiphany of sorts) that the classroom has become a conduit for bitterness on the part of many professors who did not become the superstar that, in graduate, they had imagined that they would become. 

Strikingly, bitter folks have an inexorability to them that has nothing much to do with producing anything good, but simply with exercising power over others.  Notice, for instance, that it is one thing for a professor to demand respect from her or his students even as the professor is very respect of the students in return.  By contrast, it is quite another for a professor to demand of her or his students that they accept her or his views.  At any rate, the students had better do so if they are to have any hope of getting a high grade in the professor’s class.

The kind of inexorableness that I have just described is exhibited by professors with respect to some of the most controversial issues that one might imagine: affirmative action and abortion, to take two obvious candidates here.  How can any professor think that the only correct view regarding either issue is the one that she or he holds?

Students never think of themselves as being the object of a professor’s bitterness in the classroom.  But expressions of bitterness masquerading as dispensing the unexpurgated truth is one of the ways in which bitter professors compensate for not being the professional superstar that they had hoped to become.  After all, in the classroom the professor has something of the status of a god in terms of the exercise of power over a grade. 

Now, lest there be any misunderstanding, I do not think for a moment that bitterness is easy to avoid.  Not becoming bitter is certainly not at all like choosing to shop at one supermarket rather than another.  Indeed, not becoming bitter can be an extremely difficult thing to do precisely because the wounds of disappointment grow deep.  What is more, it also the case that with age the hope of making a name for oneself grows increasingly dim. 

But an insight that I continually point out to people is that no one has everything.  Likewise, no one does everything.  With rare exception, we always have it within our power to do something that is profoundly affirming.  It may very well not be what we initially wanted to do.  That, however, is a different matter entirely. 

Interestingly, the bitter person more or less says that if I cannot have the kind of affirmation that I had dreamed of obtaining, then I will pretty much not be content with any other form of affirmation.  By contrast, the person who escapes bitterness notwithstanding great disappointment is he or she who readily turns to alternative forms of affirmation.

The ability to find alternative forms of affirmation in the face of deep disappointments—nay, failures—is pretty much the key to not becoming a bitter person.  Here, then, is an analysis of the metaphor of deciding whether to see the glass as half-empty or half-full.  If life is that glass, then we can either dwell eternally upon the fact that we did not get to realize one dream that would provided deep and abiding affirmation or, alternatively, we can notice that there are other marvelous ways of obtaining deep and abiding forms affirmation.  

Life did not serve up but one way to find deep and abiding affirmation.  It is we who make the mistake of insisting that it is either one way or no way.  Thus, the bitter person short changes herself or himself.  Nay, the bitter person destroys or ignores the various alternative bridges available to her or him with regarding to obtaining deep and abiding affirmation simply because these alternative bridges were not part of the original plan of travel.  

The gift of living well is inextricably tied to choosing well.  And choosing well consists in being mindful of the forms of marvelous and genuine affirmation that life serves us. 

As with a buffet, sometimes we get what we initially set our sights upon.  Then sometimes we have to turn to an alternate dish.  The alternative may never serve as a complete substitute for what we really wanted.  Yet, it may be incredibly good nonetheless and, in any case, turning to it is vastly superior to not eating at all. 

The bitter are those who hold that they can enjoy a good meal only if what they eat is what they had set their sights upon at the outset.  The non-bitter, by contrast, can appreciate that they had a very good meal and indeed savour it notwithstanding the fact that what they actually ate is not what they had initially hoped to eat. 

On this way of viewing things, not being bitter is a moral gift that we can give to ourselves if only we should choose to do so.  Alas, the bitter person is too busy being bitter to see this simple but ever so sublime truth. 

s adults, we are often quite preoccupied with physical appearances.  From weight to facial features to hair style to clothes and more, we are often in the throes of a constant struggle in order to have the ideal look or, at any rate, the best looking appearance that we can have given our assets.  Certainly, this seems to be the way it is nowadays.  It was not always like that.  But the fact that things used to be different is not what I want to talk about.  What intrigues me is the perspective of children with regarding to physical beauty.

Every adult has had the experience of looking at a child and thinking “What a stunningly beautiful child”.  Interestingly, it is very rare that a young child around the age of 5 or 6 grasps this fact about herself or himself.  That is, stunningly beautiful children do not grasp this fact about themselves with the significance that adults do.  Adults know that physical beauty is a formidable asset across many dimensions.  That is, adults have a very deep sense of the social significance of physical beauty.  Even those who are quite modest about their physical beauty nonetheless grasp its significance.  While children do have a sense of physical beauty, they do not, by contrast, have a deep sense of its social significance.  

But not even that is what I want to focus upon in this blog-entry.  What intrigues me is the related but quite different issue that children generally do not judge adults in terms of physical attractiveness as such.  Quite simply, young children do not need physically beautiful parents.  More to the point, young children are indifferent to whether their parents are physically beautiful. 

Recently, I had the marvelous experience of watching some young children at an airport playing with a slightly disfigured man.  I stood there in admiration as I watched them having an absolutely wonderful time playing with him.  The children and man are white, as happens.  Then without warning, the children drew me into their fun and games. 

Suddenly, I had an epiphany.  For one thing, the children hardly thought of themselves as integrating their playing by adding a black man to the mix.  No less poignantly, of course, is the truth that the children were hardly bothered by the man’s disfigurement.  They identified with his smile and laughter; and these two things gave them considerable delight. 

No doubt everyone has had this epiphany except I.  But this is part of the narcissism of a blog.  I get to share what has been important to me, even if all the world seized the truth in question ages ago.

Just so, I have no recollection of any theory in psychology and sociology drawing attention to this truth.  Perhaps we miss it just because it is so obvious.  But what is so plainly obvious is a remarkably sublime truth: The last thing in the world that matters to stunningly beautiful children around the age of 5 is that their parents are equally beautiful or nearly so.  And that tells us just how much baggage that society adds to our social reality as adults.  Perhaps this much of this additional baggage is inevitable as our self-concept achieves full bloom as we age. 

For those who are creationists, this is a wonderful moment to think that surely something like the workings of a divine being has to be at play. 

On the one hand, I am being somewhat facetious.  On the other, there is an edge of seriousness here. 

If being cared for by physically beautiful people mattered at the very outset of our lives, the human species as we now know it could simply not survive.  Thus, it is mind-boggling that what matters so very much—perhaps even too much—once our self-concept is in place matters not at all during the most formative stages of our lives. 

Alas, by the time our self-concept is fully in place it seems to be that people are more attractive to physical appearances than to character itself; whereas precisely the opposite is true during the formative stages of our lives.  And it is next to impossible not to draw the conclusion that if, with respect to physical beauty, we had a little more of the innocence of the formative stages of our lives, we would be much better off in terms of romance and love in adulthood. 

Alas, there is something to be said for the expression “Out of the mouths of babes hast thou ordained strength”.  

We are born into this world putting character above beauty and if we are to develop properly we need those who love us to put character above beauty.  And at every step along the way thereinafter, putting character above beauty makes for a better world.  Once again: “Out of the mouths of babes hast thou ordained strength”

I have said on so many occasions that there is no power of affirmation like that of parental love.  What now needs to be also underscored is the truth that there is no receptacle more innocent and more receptive to that power, regardless of the appearances of the vessels that provides it, than children. 

This truth speaks to why parenting is so profound.  The power to affirm another to the very core receives some of greatest expression in parenting.  This majestic power would be considerably diminished if it mattered to children that they were carried for by the physically beautiful. 

I noted earlier that in some very straightforward sense the truth that children do not care about whether they are loved by beautiful parents has to be apparent to all.  Yet, there is much to gain sometimes from attending to a truth that we know without even thinking about it, precisely because in thinking about it we begin to appreciate layers of richness that we had heretofore passed over. 

It is remarkable that notwithstanding the wide range of differences that exist among human beings a big smile is by and large unmistakable.  Indeed, it is recognizable as such by a child who needs no training in detecting a smile, let along detecting a smile across differences in physical appearances.  It is remarkable that so very little can rightly mean so very much, and in precisely the right way, to a child who has so very little knowledge about anything.  This reality of our humanity is surely worth smiling about. 

n case you haven’t noticed, being a victim is all the rage.  Just everybody who is anybody is a victim these days.  Needless to say, there are many perks that come with being a victim.  Victim status is rather like having lots of frequent flyer miles with which one can upgrade at will.  Lest there be any misunderstanding, I indeed think that there are victims in society.  Why, there have always been victims in society.  What more or less distinguishes the present from the past is that it is now hip to be a victim. 

People seem to be proud of their victim status.  It defines their self-identity, makes them who they are, and so on.  Why, being a victim sometimes seems to have so much going for it that it is not clear why anyone who is a victim would want not to be a victim.

From whence cometh the enormous power of being a victim?  Notice, first of all, that being a victim gives one the right to be angry in a more or less reckless manner.  And this is not the way it used to be.  There were no special dispensations granted to victims in terms of anger except perhaps when they were in the very throes of being harmed.  Certainly, no one thought that being a victim excused angry behavior in contexts that had nothing whatsoever to do with having been wronged.

But what happened is that people took advantage of the compassion that people displayed towards a wrong that had a kind of institutional character to it.  So it stopped being that one is now being wronged, but that one has had to worry about and one is constantly having to worry about being wronged.  And any objection was met with that profoundly silencing rhetorical remark: “How dare you suppose otherwise until you have had to walk in my shoes?” 

Now, I can make sense of legitimate worries that a person has when she or he has suffered a grave harm.  If a woman has been raped, for instance, I can see easily enough how for awhile fear permeates her soul under even the most innocuous circumstances.  A woman would have to be in grave denial or or she would have to be something other than human for her not have such fear for awhile. 

But you see being a victim has ceased to be about actually having been wronged.  It is possible now to be a victim because one supposes that someone had a thought that one deemed to be inappropriate.  It might be thought that I meant to make an utterance that would be inappropriate.  Unfortunately, this sort of thing is way too real.  A person now can be offended, and so rendered a victim, for no other reason than that she deemed it to be the case, judging from a person’s hesitation (for instance) that the person had entertained an inappropriate thought. 

Women, blacks, gays, and Arabic Muslims have very little in common save that they now form that category of people for whom being offended has become something of an entitlement. 

Notice the order in which I mentioned these four groups.  Someone belonging to one of the other three groups can be offended by the fact that I did not mention her or his group first; and this will count as a reminder or her or his victim status.  And it will not due for me to intone that I meant nothing to the order; for that only shows just how insensitive I am.  There is no winning here.

The remarks of the preceding paragraph would be funny were it not for the small fact that they ring more true than not.  

True enough, compassion is a virtue and callousness is a vice.  But what seems to be roundly ignored is that the exploitation of compassion is itself a vice.  It is one thing for you to remind me of how I have in fact wronged you; it is quite another for you to inform me of all the ways in which I might have wronged you—but in fact did not—and about which you did nothing but obsess over.  In this latter instance, you are indeed a victim, but not at my hands.  Rather, your being a victim is your own doing.

Exploiting compassion has become the vice of modernity.  And the world of sound bites and 30-second visual clips serves this end very well.  A 30-second visual of women running and screaming is riveting—so much so that it almost becomes irrelevant that the event was staged.  Why?  Because our emotions have been so piqued that we would rather believe the lie. 

This last observation points to why displays of rage have become so fashionable.  For one, there is the thought the person must really be mad about something; for another, witnessing rage readily trumps witnessing tranquility. 

Regrettably, the art of victimhood will invariably have an unhappy ending.  Occasional manipulation is one thing; continuous manipulation is quite another.  The only appropriate response to continuous manipulation is moral shutdown with regard to compassion. 

On my view, then, we shall soon see the end of compassion.  We get there formally by employing what is known as the Better-Safe-Than-Sorry (BSTS) strategy. 

The idea behind BSTS is excruciatingly simple: Rather than put ourselves at some risks, we go in the opposite direction and take a safer course of action even if doing so is a bit costly along some dimension.  Walking alone is a perfect example of this.  It is rationally preferable to take a pathway that is well-lit than one that is unlit, even if the well-lit passage is a bit longer. 

Because being a victim has turned into none other than a form of exploiting compassion in so very many cases, it is increasingly become rational to not be compassionate at all—outright indifferent, even—than to be compassion only to have it turn out that one has been manipulated once again. 

It is no accident that natural disasters move us so.  For at least in this case, it is clear that there has been no manipulation at all. 

In so many other cases, nowadays, it is easy enough to wonder whether the person bears some complicity in the harm that she has suffered in that she or he should have exhibited some caution.  Or, in any case, we wonder whether the victim is exaggerating.  I have this experience every time a black on a college campus tells me that a given experience was like re-living slavery again.  The act in question could very well be racist and yet be a very, very long ways from anything remotely resembling slavery. 

Compassion is a very powerful sentiment.  It is rightly tied to witnessing the undeserved suffering of others.  And being a genuine victim of wrongdoing constitutes a form of undeserved suffering.  But compassion also presupposes that the situation was not merely a reenactment or an exaggeration.  This, in fact, is what made the Civil Rights marches so riveting and powerful.  Nothing was staged for a 30-second television moment. 

It is increasingly becoming the case, and I see no end to this, that it is simply more reasonable to think that the moment of being a victim of wrongdoing has been staged for effect. 

As is so often the case in life, shortsightedness has a way of unraveling that which is genuinely good. 

The strategy of Better-Safe-Than-Sorry makes it rational to resist feelings of compassion.  And we all be worse-off owing to the tendency of persons to exploit compassion.  There are victims and there are staged-victims.  Blurring that reality makes for a less wholesome society for all, both the victims and the staged victims.  Even those who would be compassionate, but now refrain, are made worse off.  For their lives no longer bear witness to one of the greatest forms of human excellence, namely compassion.

ome very gifted thinkers take shame to be a moral relic—an emotion more or less akin to the appendix, in that we have it but we could just as well do without it.  Even worse, we would be better off without it.  I have in mind here my good friend and marvelous scholar Ruwen Ogien who, in his book La Honte est-elle immorale? ([literal translation] Is Shame Immoral?), defends precisely this view.  Ogien’s view of shame reminds me very much of Freud’s view of guilt.  Freud more or less characterized guilt as a kind of internal weapon that more or less keeps one behaving appropriately.  Who needs that?  Self-flagellation is hardly a virtue. 

Now, it is undeniable that guilt can be painful, likewise for shame.  But what does not follow from this is that either is useless, let alone a form of self-derision or self-punishment that we could just as well do without. 

It must also be conceded that people have felt either shame or guilt when they should not have.  Indeed, social evolution makes this abundantly clear.  A century or so ago, people would have been riddled with either shame or guilt for doing all sorts of things that nowadays we do with a kind of reckless abandon.  Indeed,, to some extent shame and guilt various across different cultures.  In so-called puritanical America, nudity carries much more shame than it does in many parts of Europe.  And if we move to some Muslim countries, people have shame and guilt about things that simply make no sense to either Americans or Europeans.  Fortunately, this does not show that either sentiment is some sort of psychological relic that we need to discard. 

It seems to me that Ogien’s analysis suffers from one very fatal flaw, namely that distorted conception of the human self.  If we Vulcans (of Star Trek) fame, then his argument would go through flawlessly.  The psychological construction of Vulcans is such that to rationally believe that any proposition p is all it takes to be motivated to act in accordance with p (insofar as this is appropriate).

Thus, quite unlike us humans, a Vulcan could not believe that cigarettes are very bad for the health of Vulcans and nonetheless smoke simply for reasons of pleasure.  Again, an alcoholic Vulcan is pretty much an oxymoron. 

I need not point out that a notorious feature of human beings is that they engage in behavior that by their own account is unquestionably bad for them.  Any account of sentiments like guilt and shame needs to start with this fact about human beings rather than superimpose upon human beings a conception of rationality that simply does not apply to them. 

It has always seemed to me that for all of its richness Western thought has had enormous difficulty coming to grips with the reality that human beings are not just rational creatures.  That is, we are absolutely not rational creatures in the sense in which Vulcans are. 

Far too often, emotions are treated like add-ons, and so things we can subtract from our account of human beings and still be left with the proper conception of a human being.  Not so, however.

For human beings, the sentiments are a deep form of self-knowledge; and what we learn about ourselves can be good or bad. 

It is a truth that the sentiments can reveal things that we value even while we are adamant in our claim that we value no such thing.  Loves come readily to mind in this regard.  All of us know someone (or will no doubt come to such a person) who insisted that she or he had no romantic interest in X at all, although everyone with two eyes (as they say) could see otherwise.  Or notice that one version of the gay coming-out scenario goes rather like this: Joe dated women, got married, and had children.  On all accounts, the marriage was a model marriage.  Yet, Joe always felt that something was missing in his life, though he just couldn’t put his fingers on it.  Guess what: Joe discovers that he is gay.  Or, take a person of one ethnic group:  That person’s sentiments in a given situation may reveal that she or he has more trouble with the success of this or that ethnic group than that person had ever supposed possible. 

Among human beings, shame and guilt play a very profound role in that they reveal the values that we truly embrace.  Here is a very simple example.

When I give a bad lecture, I often feel a sense of shame.  To be sure, I do not go home and beat myself up.  I do not call myself names and so on.  Still, I am bothered by the fact that my lecture did not measure up in a certain way.  There is nothing oppressive about the shame that I experience here.  Quite the contrary, the shame I experience is so very informative in an extremely positive way.  It tells me mountains about the standards that I hold for myself as a lecturer.  I do not want to be indifferent to whether my lectures are successful or not.  The shame is not only informative, it serves also as a source of motivation in that I am determined not to make that mistake the next time.

I could tell a similar story regarding guilt and, inconsiderateness.  I do not want to be inconsiderate.  And when I feel guilt in this regard, the feeling tells me mountains about where my moral barometer is set. 

The point here is an extremely simple one, namely that far from standing as oppressive relics that do more harm than good, the sentiments of guilt and shame can play a most salubrious role in our lives. 

What is true, of course, is that these sentiments have to be properly constructed.  People can feel shame or guilt about the wrong things or these sentiments can take a most destructive form.  But surely this tells us what we already know, namely that the right development is necessary for the sentiments to operate in a way that is optimal in our lives.  This, alas, holds generally.

After all, one can either eat way too much or eat way too little, from which it hardly follows that eating is a bad thing.  No, regularly eating the wrong amounts is a bad thing.  This holds mutatis mutandis for sleeping and eliminating bodily waste.  Only a fool would focus upon diarrhea, and then conclude that eliminating waste gets in the way of being human—an outmoded form of behavior that is a mere relic from the past. 

It is a painful truth that people have been besieged by inappropriate feelings of shame and guilt.  Alas, this too is often instructive; for it tells us that something has gone wrong with our upbringing or that we have had a series of experiences that have warped our sense of things.  But as I have noted, guilt and shame can be informative in a most affirming way. 

In any case, what remains unequivocally true is that guilt and shame are significant vectors of the values that we embrace.  Guilt and shame provide a source of self-knowledge in this regard that we could not have otherwise.  We human beings are not Vulcans nor, for that matter, are we gods.  Accordingly, the sentiments play a role in our introspection, and so our self-knowledge, for which there is no analogue among either Vulcans or the gods. 

In coming to grips with our humanity, philosophers are often too clever for our own good. 

This blog-entry owes much inspiration to the work of my colleague
Michael Stocker, Valuing Emotions (Cambridge University Press)