The last two weeks haven’t been great for idea generation — I spent much of the first week studying for my last final, and this last week has been dominated by tidying a research project. But two ideas have been in the back of my mind, and I think they’re related, though I’m not exactly sure what the conclusion from juxtaposing the two together is. (I’m not even sure I know what the conclusion to each idea is!) Naturally, I thought I’d just write and see where it goes. This post will almost certainly be rambly and incoherent. Mea culpa.
I. Of Relationships
What moral or practical say, if any, should your pre-existing close confidantes (e.g., your family or friends) have in your decisions about whom you choose to enter into close relationships with? Or, to give a more concrete example of this question: should your family or friends have a veto over whom you choose to date or marry?
Over the last month-and-a-half, the church has been discussing Song of Songs — essentially, Biblical love poetry. Song of Songs, in different parts, seems to depict an idealized romantic relationship; at other times, it seems to suggest practical wisdom about how to deal with realities of human relationships; and throughout, it may be an allegory for the relationship between a church and its congregants. (I’m bracketing that third part out of this discussion.)
My friend, whom I’ve been getting weekly lunches with, filled in for the pastors in preaching last Sunday. In his sermon, he cited chapter 8, verse 1 of the book, where the woman says to her lover: “If only you were to me like a brother, who was nursed at my mother’s breasts! Then, if I found you outside, I would kiss you, and no one would despise me.” The sermon explained that, in historical context, public displays of affection between lovers would have been frowned upon, but that such displays were acceptable between siblings. The woman, in this telling, yearns to publicly display her love but is held back by social custom. From this verse and the rest of the chapter, my friend argued that the Bible called for public recognition of private relationships, most obviously in the form of marriage. There is a theological and moral difference, in other words, between a publicly sanctioned relationship (marriage) and one that is not so, even if that relationship carries the same kind of enduring commitments and obligations that marriage typically accompanies.
Setting aside the scriptural basis for that argument (my sense is that Song of Songs can actually be read in a more subversive way), I did think the argument itself was intriguing. As my friend pointed out in the sermon, it’s clear that the cultures I inhabit understand relationships to be intensely private: there is (or ought to be) little role for the law in regulating private relationships. So, too, presumably, with less quintessentially public contexts — just as the state ought not judge our personal relationships, I think many of my peers would agree that we ought not judge other adults’ consensual personal relationships except in narrow circumstances (such as when they are no longer consensual). The interpretation of Song of Songs advanced was a much more communitarian understanding of relationships, where public institutions structure our private relationships. (Consider the phrase “speak now or forever hold your peace” or the practice of some Christian churches to announce banns of marriage).
Two interrelated questions arise from this argument. The first concerns scope and form: if there is some role for communal input in our decisions regarding relationships, what ought that role to be and to whom (what “community”) should that role be extended? The second concerns the nature of the argument: is it that that communal role makes the relationship better practically by furthering some pre-existing reason for that relationship, or is that communal role in some way an improvement of that relationship intrinsically, i.e., that the relationship is per se better when it is sanctioned by and embedded within a community.
To help shed some light on these distinctions, let me give two concrete examples that I suspect would be fairly universally agreed upon. First, what I’d call the reason-giving test. If you can’t look yourself in the mirror and give yourself reasons that you find subjectively persuasive for entering into or maintaining a relationship, then that relationship is probably a bad one. This test sounds silly, but I think it’s actually fairly meaningful. It’s not uncommon to hear of a toxic relationship where someone says they ‘knew’ the relationship was a bad one. But coming to terms with that is often difficult, and articulating it outloud may help.
In terms of the question of scope, the test is either non-communal or (in my view) the lowest possible form of communal input. It’s non-communal in the sense that, obviously, there’s no other person’s input. But, in my view, there is some kind of interpersonal frame here. For when we speak, we tend to think both in terms that are more rational (recall that the Greek word logos, the root of the word logic, can be translated both as “speech” and “reason”) and more intersubjective (language itself is shared among others, which is precisely what makes articulating our feelings so difficult — one must translate something so intimately personal into an intelligible, mutually understood medium). In giving reasons, we filter out the habits that we would seek only for untoward reasons, reasons for which we’d have difficulty looking ourselves in the eyes and admitting to. Note, though, that this test is a pragmatic one — that one can give reasons for a relationship likely does not improve the relationship intrinsically, but it does serve as a heuristic for screening out bad relationships.
Here’s a second example: the family test. In essence, the test says that your family ought to have some say in whom you get married to. I think this test helps illustrate the relationship between issues of scope and of nature. If you think of the family test as primarily pragmatic, then you’d probably do an analysis that takes account for some combination of the following factors: how much do you like this proposed spouse versus the possible other options (noting, as the economists would say, information costs and tradeoffs); how much does the family dislike the proposed spouse; what kind of relationship do you have to your family, and, in particular, how often will your family have to interact with you and your spouse; how much can you, your spouse, and your family adjust to dislike; and so on? In the most base but stereotyped example, the family test is about whether a marriage can survive awkward family get-togethers (or whether a familial relationship can survive such get-togethers).
On the flip side, if one thinks of the family test as getting at something deeper — i.e., as constituting an intrinsic part of the relationship — then one would likely think that the test ought to have power that approaches a veto: if the family dislikes the proposed spouse, then the marriage cannot go forward. For, one might think, a proper marriage ought to be the joining not only of two people but of two families. The key consideration then, I think, is not about balancing the cons of familial dislike with the strength of a particular relationship, but rather, the extent to which the families will feel capable and willing to work together to make a relationship survive.
It seems to me eminently obvious that for many people, there will be pragmatic reasons that relationship decision making is in some way communal (if only at the family level). When I talked with one of my flatmates, his test was pretty simple: for romantic relationships analogous to marriage, very close friends and families ought to be consulted (but they don’t get any veto); for any other relationships, one has no obligation to consult other people. The distinction he drew was based on the extent to which a given relationship will dominate one’s life: there is a categorical distinction between a marriage and a friendship, even a close one, such that one ought to consult close confidantes for a proposed marriage but not otherwise.
This argument doesn’t work for me in two ways. First, I’m not convinced that our relationships ought to be so cleanly divided. My views on this may change as I age (I’m reminded of the description of Friends as depicting that time in your life where your friends are your family, a phase that ends after marriage). But from my vantage point now, it seems artificial to say that close friendships are completely different from romantic relationships, even simply as a matter of time or devotion. An attorney once told me that when he worked a BigLaw job right out of clerking, he basically didn’t see his girlfriend for two whole years because of how much work he was doing. Surely one’s ‘relationship’ to one’s job ought to get the same kinds of consultative obligations as a proposed marriage when one’s job is so dominant over one’s life. And if that’s the case, then aren’t certain intimate friendships where there is a reciprocal understanding of preeminent time commitments similar?
A second reason my flatmate’s arguments did not persuade me: it too easily, I think, dismissed the idea of an inherent value in public recognition. That is, I find it intuitive that there ought to be some kind of intrinsic normative commitment to kinds of publicity. It would feel odd to me if a married couple were unwilling to wear rings in public (barring obvious concerns, such as the one illustrated in Song of Songs — when society does not sanction certain kinds of relationships). It would not feel right to me if I were not to, in some way, consult my family and friends about my decision to marry. In both examples, there are obvious pragmatic reasons to favor those ideas (the former may raise natural questions — why not profess your married status? — while the latter may lead to the family-gatherings problem), but I also do think there is something intrinsically valuable independent of those prudential reasons.
I’m not exactly sure where this argument leaves me, but I will note three other comments about this general thread of thinking.
First, a comment from my flatmate that I do very much agree with: in real life, relationships are fluid. Sometimes they oscillate, growing and shrinking over time; other times, they fade away. Maybe, he argued, this model of thinking about public recognition for relationships is too contrived, too theoretical, for real life.
In my mind, the critique helps us understand how public recognition is an aspect of intentionality. Our different rituals — from changing one’s Facebook relationship status to marriage — represent symbolic but intentional moments of recognizing and therefore concretizing (or perhaps more aptly, ratcheting) relationships. Public recognition, it seems to me, is about embedding the reality of a relationship within networks of people, which in turn help stabilize the relationship. Fluidity, in that sense, is a reason to be selectively public in recognition, rather than a reason to dodge thinking through the publicity of relationships.
Second, I’ve articulated a lot of the concrete examples in terms of ‘tests.’ Maybe that’s because I’m too immersed in regulation and law literature (definitely); maybe that’s because I’m a nerd (also true). But maybe it’s also because making this idea concrete (the importance of public recognition in private relationships) requires narrow, discrete methods of implementation, of which ‘tests’ are an obvious example. Indeed, I’m not sure I can think of a way to make the idea more concrete without talking in terms of specific ‘tests’ that one can do. The problem with this line of thinking, of course, is that tests will tend toward biasing in favor of pragmatic considerations rather than intrinsic ones; public recognition understood as such will tend to be described in terms of instrumental utility rather than intrinsic value.
Third, I think how persuasive these arguments are will depend a lot on one’s self-conception. That is — to make a slightly tautological argument — the more you think of yourself as a strong, independent individual, the more you will tend toward only pragmatic considerations for public recognition (or the more likely you are to think that there is no role for public recognition). In contrast, if you see yourself as relational and dependent, then public recognition may seem more important. But, to try to push through the tautology, I think whether public recognition is of intrinsic importance will depend on how much one understands their other relations — their communities — to be intrinsic to their identity, i.e., to be constitutive, such that thinking of oneself as isolated and independent is incoherent. Thought in that way, the political philosophy debate underlying this entire conversation (that between classical liberalism and communitarianism) is really just about, to quote my favorite show at the moment, a “state of mind.”
II. Of Hypocrisy and Authenticity
In the last section, I wrote about what we might think of as quintessentially private and argued that there is some role for public recognition. I’ve been reading (of course) Judith Shklar, and I think some of her thoughts on hypocrisy might shed light on that same idea from a different angle.
Hypocrisy is about diverging between one’s professed ideas and one’s actual life. Hypocrisy is therefore linked with authenticity: if a hypocrite were to really believe in something, then they would live by it. Either they don’t really believe in it (they’re inauthentic), or they simply can’t live by it and are thus condemnable for it. Authenticity is private (it’s about who you really are), and hypocrisy results from public performances of (in)authenticity.
The link between hypocrisy and authenticity is, I think, important for understanding why hypocrisy is so viscerally despised. After all, on its own, hypocrisy shouldn’t seem like that big of a deal, especially for comparatively minor stuff: for example, we all talk about how lying is bad, but of course almost everyone will lie occasionally. Often, those lies don’t harm anyone (they’re ‘white lies’). And we don’t usually assume everyone is bad, even if we can with fair probability assume they both oppose lying generally and do lie at least sporadically. But we certainly hate the hypocrite who openly professes to hate lying while lying as well. Why?
I remember my government teacher in high school railing against politicians for being hypocritical, which points to one obvious reason that Shklar explains: in contexts of group competition where values are not shared, the easiest way to attack someone is to argue that they’re a hypocrite — that they don’t even live up to their own values, let alone to ours.
But the stronger reason, I think, is that we value authenticity, which hypocrisy opposes. The media I’ve consumed over the last few weeks — Derry Girls, We Are Lady Parts, and the Friends Reunion — are all about authenticity of some form. The first two have been lauded for “authentically” portraying some communities and peoples; the latter “authentically” revives the old joy of Friends some seventeen years after its end. In searching for food, we seek authenticity — food is best, we are told, when made by those who have an authentic background. Thought in this light, hypocrisy is a superset of so-called cultural appropriation, the idea of borrowing from a culture that is not one’s own and profiting from it (with a connotation of doing so in a hamfisted way). With cultural appropriation, one suggests authenticity but reveals that that authenticity is just a farce. Hypocrisy is generalized farcical authenticity. As we crave authenticity more, so too do we hate hypocrisy.
Shklar says, broadly, that we need to be more accommodating toward hypocrisy because we are inevitably hypocrites, and because hypocrisy, even if it rubs us the wrong way, isn’t really all that bad. I want to highlight just one small component of her argument.
Shklar says that in liberal societies, people inevitably play lots of different roles because they inhabit different associations. The same person might be a girl scout troop leader, a professor, and a pastor. In those different roles, how ought that person to act? A simplistic understanding of authenticity would argue that that person ought to be the same across all roles; after all, there is only one true self, and one ought to live genuinely according to that self. But you don’t have to take such a caricaturized view, even if you are one who believes strongly in authenticity. You might well recognize that our girl-scout-troop leading, professor-pastor will need to act differently in different circumstances: her instincts to push people to think differently and to be contrarian, even, might work for college students but may be inapt for being a troop leader; her instincts to offer practical, concrete moral guidance as a pastor may cut against her instincts to take a hands-off, enabling approach to leading a troop where she seeks to breed future leaders. But, you would say, she can still be authentic if her essential characteristics stay stable, and if she is true to them across the hats she wears.
We can debate the merits of that argument — it seems intuitively right but has intractable line-drawing problems, in my opinion (what’s an ‘essential’ characteristic for defining one’s identity?) — but I think the argument is perhaps more convoluted than necessary. The Occam’s-Razor answer, I think, is just that authenticity is not a plausible ideal for life in a pluralistic society. Shklar says that in strict caste systems, where your social standing is static, people feel less insecure in their authenticity — in a sense, you have no choice but to be authentic, since you can’t move anywhere, nor can you hide your social status. It’s only when we become socially mobile that authenticity becomes a pressing issue. In societies with less caste rigidity, authenticity is about how much one stays ‘true’ to one’s metaphorical roots. Shklar writes,
The true inner self is identified with one’s childhood and family, and regret as well as guilt for having left them behind may render new ways artificial, false, and in some way a betrayal of that original self. This personal self is seen as having a primacy that no later social role can claim; and indeed the latter may be despised as demeaning, “stereotyped,” or simply “fake”—in any case less genuine than the primordial self.
If social mobility is desirable, as I think it is, then it follows that we ought to be less anxious about authenticity, lest we box people into certain categories based on their roots. But I think those in my generation have tended toward the opposite conclusion — in the pursuit of authenticity, they have increasingly understood people in terms of a certain identity characteristic and to define them as such. (To me, this is the very definition of identity politics rightly understood: the idea that there is a necessary linkage between one’s identity backgrounds and one’s politics.)
To return to hypocrisy, then, the normative conclusion must be that we need to tone down our obsession with persecuting hypocrites. In valuing authenticity less, we despise hypocrisy less, too. Note that in this context, then, the conclusion is a reverse of my previous section: whereas there, I argued in favor of greater public recognition of private practice, with hypocrisy, I suggest there’s value in shielding the private, intimate questions of authenticity from the public persecution of hypocrisy.
Underneath both arguments, though, is the idea that the liberal individual is not quite so autonomous. That is, our relationships exist in networks of interlinking and interdependent people, such that others’ input is both prudent and perhaps intrinsically valuable. Similarly, our selves are manifested only in relation to different social roles — those social positions are not only projections of, but also constitutive of, our identities.
In some sense, this conclusion feels rather circular with the first part. In other words, if you already bought the argument that our relationships don’t exist in vacuums but rather are embedded in networks of relationships, then you probably would quickly buy the idea that there is a role for public recognition of a private relationship. What makes this conclusion interesting, though, is that I think the same principle points in the opposite normative conclusion for thinking through hypocrisy and authenticity: precisely because authenticity is so fluid and based on social relationships, we ought to be less willing to test authenticity — less willing to subject private habits to public recognition and condemnation.
This conclusion is also interesting, I think, because it cuts against Shklar’s theoretical background. Shklar was very much a liberal — she believed in protecting the private and the autonomous from the domineering public sphere. She was concerned with, of course, limiting state-sanctioned violence and cruelty, which people who lived through the early twentieth century were all too familiar with. But she was also concerned with social coercion, the manifold ways that we, through our ordinary vices, make each other’s (and our own) lives more difficult. Hence, part of what motivates her critique of antihypocrisy is the way in which persecuting hypocrites (she cites, among other examples, the zealotry of the Puritan mind) is self-defeating and leads to paranoia, cruelty, and insecurity.Where hypocrisy is put first among the ordinary vices, Shklar suggests, our capacities to flourish as individuals are eroded. My argument, instead, concerns how antihypocrisy might degrade our sensibilities as individuals part of collectives, i.e., how putting hypocrisy first might suggest a greater authenticity than is possible or desirable in collective life.
* * * * *
Roses:
The last two weeks (besides work) have actually been pretty fun! Nice things that have happened:
* I went to Bury St Edmunds to meet up with a Marshall friend who lives in East England. We went because this small town has some cool Magna Carta history — in 1214, the barons met there and resolved to force King John to accept some kind of treaty defining their liberties. In fact, in the ruins of the old abbey, we found a plaque commemorating the literal location where the barons met. How cool! I also had my first English scone (amazing and amazingly terrible for you if you do it right, i.e., if you add all the toppings of jam, butter, and clotted cream). We also went to a National Trust site (think old British heritage sites preserved for tourism purposes) about three miles out of Bury — the Ickworth House, an Italian-style mansion — that had a surprising number of paintings by very famous artists (think Vigee-Lebrun).
* I met some new LSE folks for a Government Department “coffee break” — they gave us each five-pound gift certificates and paired us with people, which was a fun initiative. The people I met were studying conflict studies; one of them was previously a journalist covering conflict zones (she’d been to Iraq and Venezuela, for example), while the other one was a international humanitarian aid worker and had previously worked as a committee staffer in the Senate. Very interesting people.
* I met up with a Pomona friend in London; we went to Finsbury Park together to see an art installment. The art consisted of a “walking tour” where you walk in a certain direction and your phone plays an audio clip, which is the artist and their friends talking about random stuff. To be honest, I didn’t really get the experience. (It also felt to me vaguely contradictory with the purpose: if the goal is to help you experience the park more fully, walking in a single direction while wearing headphones and listening to a recording seems like the exact opposite of what you should be trying to do.) But we did have a nice picnic, too, and a cute dog kept coming over to play with us (really to beg for our food).
* One of my old Pomona friends came to London to visit. We went to the National Gallery together (lots of medieval European art — I learned the names of many Christian saints that day), and then to a ballet performance (I’m not sure ballet is quite my cup of tea).
* We sent in our revised manuscript on the OLC project on Monday! That, in addition to studying for the final, was taking a lot of my time, so it’s nice to get that off my plate. We’ll turn back to the project in a few weeks and plan for how to continue over the summer and moving into next year.
Buds:
* I’ve got a vaccine appointment! England just opened up to people over the age of 18 today, and mine are booked for July 6 and August 31.
* I’ve been spending more time on dissertation work, which is fun. I’m still waiting on my ethics approval, after which I’ll get to start reaching out to people for interviews. I think August will be very hectic, though.
Thorns:
* It’s peak allergy season, and I’m getting absolutely destroyed by the pollen. But I’m hoping that if I consistently take antihistamines, the symptoms will eventually get less bad. (Or at least that the peak season will be over within a few weeks.)
* In a surprising turn of events, it’s suddenly gotten pretty hot in London, after months of bone-chilling weather. Compared to Claremont, the heat is never that high absolutely (today’s high is 85 F), but the sun is really strong, the air is humid, and there’s no air conditioning anywhere. To put a more positive spin on it, though, I did get a classic English ice cream treat that one of my British friends recommended: a 99 Flake (which, it turns out, is actually just a vanilla ice cream cone with a chocolate candy stuck in it, BUT IT WAS A NOVELTY NEVERTHELESS). Here’s a picture.
Gratitude:
* I’m grateful that things are opened up so that I can meet friends and travel a little bit. Also that the vaccine eligibility has expanded and that I can get a vaccine in the near future!
Future topics: I promise I will turn to meritocracy next week.
