Shades of Grey
Billy Joel is one of the greatest popular songwriters of the second half of the 20th century. By saying so, without the qualifiers “I believe” or “in my opinion,” I’m not suggesting I have access to absolute truth; the obvious fact that I’m saying it implies that it’s my take. Nonetheless, by saying so in a public forum, I open myself up to mild vitriol, not conversation or even debate, which I would welcome, but opposition, as if the only alternatives were to be “pro-Billy Joel” or “anti-Billy Joel.” This kind of “discourse” is still-born: Nothing can come of it, nothing is learned, nothing illuminated.
What are the sources of this compulsion to “take a side” no matter how complex the actual human reality may be? One is probably that our identity has come to be defined by the stances we take. As interaction in the actual physical world of community and neighborhood has diminished and been replaced by cyber-interaction on social media, our identities have come to depend more on disembodied words, specifically the opinions and attitudes we express on-line. We become personally invested, deeply invested, in being for or against this or that, because this is the chief, or only, way the self can assert itself.
Of course, we have always known people who seem dogmatic or monolithic in their opinions, but the growing dominance of social media and online “community” has dramatically intensified things. Every assertion, every opinion, every post seems to require a response, which can only be a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down, whether in the form of an emoticon, a Facebook click or, all too often, an angry attack on the poster. It begins to seem compulsive, like endless hand-washing, this inability to simply listen and try to understand where the poster is coming from. Threads often seem like volleys of cannonballs sailing back and forth across some 18th-century battlefield, and the more vitriolic the posts become, the clearer it is that the writers are desperately invested in being “right,” having the “right” information, the “right” opinion, the “right” politics. Can there be many among us who don’t find all this deeply boring?
Social-media interaction on subjects of public import is like the “zipless fuck”: It gets you off without saddling you with the troublesome consequences of an actual human encounter. In a way, it’s also like online pornography. The people with whom we trade dismissive, insulting or enraged posts are no more than fantasies we indulge in order to gratify our own ideas about ourselves.
If it’s true that the polarization we’re all familiar with in today’s simulacrum of “public discourse” grows, at least in part, from a deep insecurity about who we are, then it should come as no surprise that the need to champion a given ideological perspective is most prevalent among the young. Young people, whether they’re aware of it or not, are always struggling to become someone. Their trajectory from childhood to adulthood in this transitional period involves strenuously rejecting some things and championing others. They are generally more prone to black-and-white views of the world than they will be when they’re older. They are what they espouse and are not what they condemn. Often that’s the entire gamut of possibilities. There is unarguably a kind of innocent glory in this, the focused passion of the true believer, inimical to compromise and suspicious of subtleties. They don’t know enough to see the complexities of human and historical realities; they haven’t lived long enough to feel genuine empathy because empathy is always rooted in a felt analogy with one’s own experience, which in their case is limited.
It’s no accident that one of the defining movements of our time is known in some circles as “identity politics.” Obviously, there’s nothing wrong with identifying strongly with a group, especially one that has been historically oppressed and denied human rights. It’s exciting to watch these movements take shape and nurture solidarity among whole classes of people who together can change the world for the better. However, the disturbing dimension of identity politics, taken as a whole, lies in developments common to many progressive, liberationist movements throughout history: the ease with which they adopt the language and tactics of the oppressor; the mob psychology that makes reasonable discourse impossible; and the binary mindset that divides the world into good and bad, “right-thinking” and “wrong-thinking” people, friends and foes. Any dogmatic ideology views nuance as irrelevant and the making of distinctions as the work of the devil. Too often the party line seems to be that if a few innocents are destroyed in the Great Purge, that’s simply the price that has to be paid for justice. That’s a dangerous train to board. You never know what stations it’s going to stop at.
We live in a culture where it’s increasingly difficult to know who we are. Technology has changed the world so quickly and so dramatically that our humanity hasn’t had the chance to catch up. The ease with which we can move around the planet, physically and virtually, has undermined our feelings of connection to a place; the explosion of easily obtained “information” (not to be confused with “knowledge”) has eroded our faith in the possibility of facts, let alone truth. We have retreated into the hermetically sealed safe spaces of nuclear family, workplace and ideology, even as we have become ever more disconnected from the natural world, the extended family of relatives and neighborhood, and the messy here-and-now of chance encounter. Higher education has become merely the means to an economic end: joining the ranks of wage slaves and empty, soul-sapping corporate drones. Lacking a positive vision of who we are, who we want to be or dream of being, we have become chronically reactive: The heinous, cruel or idiotic actions of others become our motivating obsession, and the more of this we see, care of the mainstream media and the Internet, the more enraged we become, our mental and emotional lives dominated by opposition to what others do. Soon this becomes a defining feature of our identity and can be measured by the time we invest in expressing this opposition and the angry vehemence with which we express it. Thus, personal desperation masquerades as political philosophy, and even when we’re not explicitly attacking a specific person but an opinion, the marrow in the bone is personal animus, born of our own spiritual and psychological malaise.
It’s a question of supply and demand: As opportunities to become oneself, which rely on a fertile connection to our social, cultural and natural environments, dwindle, something hard-wired in us continues to seek a plausible conviction that we are someone in particular, but does so in increasingly frantic ways, like a drowning swimmer struggling for air. Inevitably, this entails a dehumanization of those we’ve decided are our enemies and a lack of empathy or emotional imagination with regard to others. And so it often seems on social media and in the identity politics movement that people are clinging to their opinions like a climber to the sheer rock face, impervious to doubt because to doubt, even for a moment, would mean catastrophe.
In young people – say those in their teens, 20s or 30s – the wearing of this kind of protective gear is understandable. But if it continues into chronological adulthood, it means their growth has for some reason been stunted. They’ve gotten stuck in an earlier developmental stage. I say this without judgment, because the causes, as I’ve tried to suggest above, are not entirely personal. But addiction to a closed-minded and simplistic division of human beings into, say, “woke” and “unwoke” is in fact a regressive position to take, however “progressive” the agenda claims to be. It naturally gives birth to the “gotcha” mania, in which a corps of beady-eyed Spanish inquisitors works tirelessly to uncover the “sins” of famous or near-famous people so they can out them and call for their tar-and-feathering. What a dismal and depressing project!
As it happens, I like Billy Joel (so there!). I like “Angry Young Man” and “Shades of Grey,” which are particularly apposite here. (Give them a listen if you haven’t recently.) I like Louis CK, even though he did a distasteful and seriously foolish thing. I like Al Franken, even if he did at one point in his life have a frat boy’s sense of humor, and I have no intention of boycotting Picasso’s work even if Picasso the man treated women badly (which of course he did). I like Jonathan Schwartz and Leonard Lopate and might even like them if someone can actually demonstrate they did genuinely crappy things (which no one has). I admire Ezra Pound the writer even though he was an anti-Semite and Fascist sympathizer. I can appreciate the artistry of Leni Riefenstahl as I abhor the uses to which she put it. I love Mark Twain even though his use of the word “nigger” makes some people feel “unsafe.” I’m not a huge fan of Chuck Close, but if I was, his asking women to pose nude or saying their vaginas looked “delicious” wouldn’t turn me against his work – or him, for that matter. I have friends who have done truly despicable things and I still love them. I myself have done despicable things, and though I may regret them, I can’t change them; all I can do is hope I have become a better person than I was. This, it seems to me, is how it works.
How do you respond to the previous paragraph? Can you feel the urge to formulate a position on it bubbling up within you? Are you someone who agrees or are you someone who disagrees? What is at stake in the stance you adopt? Can you separate the opinions expressed from the person who expressed them? Are you thinking about what I wrote in order to develop or riff on the ideas or simply to determine your position, in keeping with your sense of who you are?
And what to make of me? Am I to be drummed out of the corps of right-thinking people? Am I to be viewed as a closet conservative? (Look — he hasn’t even mentioned Trump!) Am I a “bad” person or a “good” one? (Inquiring minds want to know.)
But put this way, the question does seem meaningless. What do we gain by answering it? If the truth is to be found, isn’t it, as George Saunders suggested in a passage I posted on Facebook recently, in the specifics? Ham-fisted judgments of a person too often live in the arena of generality, vagueness and unexamined assumptions; with specificity, we find ourselves confronted with obstinate complexities, which are harder to process but for all that are truer to human life, with all its contradictions and resistance to reductive judgment. Pursuing the latter, we find compassion, empathy and love, the most powerful forces for solidarity and social change there are, and the most frightening to the powers that be. Settling for the former, we turn our backs on the very principles we claim to be fighting for.