Having "pubbed" my story (without really "pimping" it commercially), I find others sometimes try to "drag me in" to their lives, in ways that would have been inappropriate before, so I walk in their shoes before being heard (and don't "get out of things", as my mother would have said it). I can see how my openness to that could be seen as related to stability, at least with matters of social or economic inequality or injustice, although not necessarily religious. There is an idea, common however in religious circles, called personal "rightsizing" as relevant to stability and gradual migration not just fairness but community.
Wednesday, May 06, 2015
Being "special" is a stretch beyond being "different"
The opposite bookend from abstract policy discussion
is considering of the question, “How should I live anyway?” Up close and personal, life is relativistic
and “quantized”. I’ve posed this as a
topic question for someone who views himself as “different” or even “special”. The simple libertarian idea of “personal
responsibility” as generating all moral considerations gets complicated by
essential or inherent inequality, by the reality that we don’t start at the
same place in line, and that some of us benefit from the invisible sacrifices
of others. So life comes knocking, and
sometimes demands conformity to goals set by others. The fact that others make so much of “my” own
personal choices only reinforces my notion that I am “special” as well as
different. Maybe that’s not so good.
So, “I am what I am”, and “my life what it is”, and
even. “I am where I am”, whatever the surrounding political issues. At any given time, the typical cause that
someone tries to recruit me to has little or no chance of significantly affecting
me. But over time, many do. Back in the 70s, the energy crisis could have
affected my “getting around” and meeting people on my terms during my “second
coming”. Because of my own background
with the military draft and previous college expulsion, the “don’t ask don’t
tell” issue was more pertinent to me than, say, marriage equality is
today. In fact, during my “working
life”, I was left alone most of the time (not all), and the pressing personal
issues (circumstances in the workplace, or a desired “relationship”) seemed to
constitute my universe There was “real
life”, even in my own separate world, back in the 70s and 80s, even earlier,
and it could become quite captivating.
But, coercion and discrimination were a major factor
in my life earlier, and a different kind of pressure exists now. So, I ask, what do “You” want? I think it’s fair that “you” should be able
to articulate your needs.
I think what is “needed” falls into a few, about four
steps. First, you want “me” to display
the practical skills that meet the real, even adaptive needs of other
people. I know that, in the sense of
gender conformity as a male, I have an issue with this and really did when I
was growing up and coming of age. Then you want me actually to deploy the skills with
real people with needs. Then you want me
to find emotional satisfaction doing so, even if the time and resources divert
me from my own goals. You want this
process to start with “family first” and only then move out into the world.
An obvious question would be, doesn’t this fit into an
authoritarian system? Doesn’t it serve
those already in charge of a patriarchal (perhaps religious, perhaps
communistic or fascist) political structure? It can, but we’re still asking
“what do ‘I’ do?” Furthermore, what it
the ends of those “in charge” are morally wrong? Doesn’t that make me wrong to? Pastor Rick Warren has taken up that question
and says, for a while that’s not “my” responsibility, but that is a reason I
need a “savior”. Even modern quantum
physics says, there is no way to be “right” all the time, so you need
forgiveness. Once “I” am socialized in
my family, then I may constructively start applying critical thinking and, in a
free enough society, migrate to a different community if necessary. But, “I” must always “belong” somewhere
first.
Indeed, I could see this process through different
periods of my life. Once established in
New York City in the mid 1970s in my young adulthood, the Ninth Street Center,
which I had discovered, seemed to expect some of the same psychological
loyalties of a “family”. But I was
always “cherry picking”, and bringing up extraneous external issues (the
political ones, like the energy and financial crises then), that could limit my
own field to what was before me. My
tendency toward “upward affiliation” could indeed inspire resentment of others.
But, because of my lack of physical competitiveness, I
indeed had to strike a separate peace. I
would avoid partisan advocacy or alliance, play umpire from a distance, and
keep on throwing “critical thinking” at everyone. “Upward affiliation” made
sense in driving what I would find important and people, and I needed to do my
own work alone and put it out. That is
often the temperament not so much of, say, a novelist (who really must care
about ordinary people), but of a musician and composer, who can “live in your
world if ideas” and hide the most disturbing implications of some of his ideas. There are some young artists and composers, a
few decades younger, whose lives seem a bit parallel to mine and who appear
more successful in art and music as a legitimate career than I was. They had the advantage of technology and a
more progressive society, to be sure, but they were also better at “practical
things” first as boys or young men than I was.
On the other hand, if I were more “competitive”
socially, I would indeed be more willing to show “solidarity” and join with
others in pursuing narrower goals. And,
frankly, the same would have been true in the world of marriage and
dating. Had I been “better at it”, I
would have found it more “alluring”. I
don’t think I ever processed what it would mean to raise a biological child from
conception to adulthood, but I had every reason to believe, according to the
ideas of the time, to believe it would not turn out well (that is,
self-exclusion and “eugenics”).
So why is all of this socialization necessary? One major reason is simply, to provide
resilience. Bad things happen to good
people, ranging from disease (inherited, environmental, sometimes behavioral)
to external aggression, including crime and war. People need to form and keep relationships
despite the loss of appeal from these incidents, and their ability to do so
helps keep a society or “tribe” strong and resistant to enemies, as well as
make it sustainable. Yes, I resented the
idea that this sort of common need should actually motivate a conjugal relationship
among less than ideal partners. Sharing
of risks and sacrifices, somewhat publicly, supports stability (and aims toward
“equality”). Solidarity, if not completely honest intellectually, can be necessary for survival. But, at an individual
level, this is all a bit like quantum mechanics, it is unpredictable. We all face our own specific challenges, and
they will be different for different people.
So I could be expected to deal with mine, and not pretend it was “disability”.
Furthermore, challenges are different in various generations. I had to deal with male-only conscription,
and as I wrote about it in my DADT books, I could see it made me look a bit
self-serving and cowardly, according to the values of earlier generations. Today, as an extension of reverence for life when vulnerable, there is a lot more emphasis on very
personalized sharing, like for medical transplants, in ways not imagined when I
was growing up. But they are still
special challenges. We can also see
that, ironically, modern social media can bring war to own lands.
The libertarian idea of personal responsibility, which
I tried to reduce to atomic terms in the Introduction to my DADT-1, gets
muddied when one “belongs” to a group.
If one stands out by being critical of one’s cohort, even in the
interest of critical thinking, one can bring harm to others in the group. I saw
that with the way the AIDS epidemic played out, when I started questioning
leadership with 80s-level technology, living in Dallas at the time. It happens to today in other contacts,
including especially religious hostility.
Having "pubbed" my story (without really "pimping" it commercially), I find others sometimes try to "drag me in" to their lives, in ways that would have been inappropriate before, so I walk in their shoes before being heard (and don't "get out of things", as my mother would have said it). I can see how my openness to that could be seen as related to stability, at least with matters of social or economic inequality or injustice, although not necessarily religious. There is an idea, common however in religious circles, called personal "rightsizing" as relevant to stability and gradual migration not just fairness but community.
Having "pubbed" my story (without really "pimping" it commercially), I find others sometimes try to "drag me in" to their lives, in ways that would have been inappropriate before, so I walk in their shoes before being heard (and don't "get out of things", as my mother would have said it). I can see how my openness to that could be seen as related to stability, at least with matters of social or economic inequality or injustice, although not necessarily religious. There is an idea, common however in religious circles, called personal "rightsizing" as relevant to stability and gradual migration not just fairness but community.
We have gotten used to the neo-modern idea that
responsibility for others starts with procreation – voluntary acts that create
children. True, but there are other ways
it happens. Look at happens with
eldercare now, and “filial responsibility”.
It can also arise when you get a benefit that you didn’t earn by
yourself, like inheritance – the “Raising Helen” scenario being the example
case. All of this bears on the debate
about inequality and the instability that results. If you didn't earn something and it gets yanked away by force because of indignation, you just might not get it back. Look at Scarlet O'Haa in "Gone with the Wind"-- Oh, she got it back, and lost it again.
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