Despite our Best Efforts, the Horses are Frightened

Fall Semester, 1983. Carmel High School.

With some annoyance, Mr. Lyon waved the previous year’s edition of El Padre, our school yearbook, over his head. He lowered it, and read aloud:

“You can do whatever you like, as long as you don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses.”

Mr. Lyon paused and glared at us. “I won’t name names, but someone in the class of 1983 used that as their senior quote and attributed it to Pete Townshend.  But it wasn’t Pete Townshend! It was Oscar Wilde.  Please, when it comes time for you to pick a famous or inspiring saying, do some research!”

It would be a long time before I learned that Oscar Wilde never said it either.  At sixteen, however, it took me all of three seconds to decide that whoever said it, the witticism was the most succinct summation of my family’s moral system that I had ever heard. I went home and repeated it to mama, who said that while she wasn’t quite sure that she was ready to say that we could do whatever we liked that didn’t lead to horse-frightening, the sentiment was a fine one. It captured a vital general principle.

I’ve said this many times before. In WASP culture, the primary moral binary isn’t Good/Evil or Light/Dark or Healthy/Toxic. It’s Public/Private.  The thoughts are free, and to a large extent, so too is your private conduct. In return for being granted almost unlimited freedom to live as you wish behind closed doors, you should ensure your outer behavior should be beyond reproach.  You owe it to your family to do your duty, to show up ready to lend a hand or a cheerful word. You are called to be able to go anywhere – the county jail or the charity gala – and put those around you at ease.

It’s hard work. Your feet may hurt, and your necktie may be uncomfortably tight. Your dinner partner may be a true dullard, stubbornly refusing to be drawn into conversation. People around you may be rude or smell bad. You carry on with a smile, reminding yourself that at some point, you will be able to retreat behind some closed door – to a bedroom or a bar – and you will be free to do as you please.

I have never wanted to frighten the horses. The problem is that what I did in private kept spilling out into the street. My best efforts to honor that public/private binary kept collapsing in very indiscreet encounters with police officers, rehabs, psych wards, and divorce courts. So, I did the obvious thing: I ran to the church. First the Catholics, later the Pentecostals, then the Mennonites.  Eventually, I ended up in the Kabbalah Center.  The throughline, of course, was that all of these organizations insisted on a radical integration of one’s inner and outer worlds.  The theologies were different, but the anthropology was always the same : humans were meant to match their public and private selves. We were to love the Lord with heart, mind, and behavior wherever we were, because rest assured, buckaroo, God can see your private self.  Everywhere I worshipped, they quoted Psalm 139 at me:

Search me, God, and know my heart;
    test me and know my anxious thoughts.
 See if there is any offensive way in me,
    and lead me in the way everlasting.

Even your thoughts shouldn’t frighten horses, apparently.

I kept leaving those same religious organizations because sooner or later, they asked me to challenge other people to transform. They wanted me to proselytize to one degree or another, to be a missionary of some sort.  They shared the same assumption: if all could see as we see, and live as we live, the world would be a better place.  And in the end, that always struck me as staggeringly presumptuous. In the end, I couldn’t shake the sense that all of this insistence on challenging people to be better was a violation of human dignity.  It had to be enough to ask people to please stop frightening the horses. It was too much to ask them to also reconsider what they did out of sight of easily startled beasts.

I’ve shared this anecdote before: When I was thirteen, mama caught me staring at a pretty girl in the grocery store. My mother spoke to me firmly, telling me that the intensity of my slacked-jaw gaze had been rude. There was a very good chance I could make the girl feel uncomfortable. Mama didn’t care about what I felt inside; concealed lust was fine. She did care a great deal about how that teen girl felt.

I have a good friend, raised an evangelical, who at thirteen or so was also caught by his mother staring at a young woman in a grocery store. He got a whipping, and a lecture about the danger of lust. Our mothers were both good mothers, and each was troubled by our conduct. Each saw her son’s leering as a danger. My mother worried, rightly, about how I’d make the young woman feel. My friend’s mother worried about his inner life and the state of his soul.

My friend and I both have struggled with shame all our lives, though our choices have been very different.  His shame has revolved around sex, and in some ways, mine has too.  

I have also written frequently about how terrified I am of conflict. I will do anything to avoid it.  After five divorces, I am quite clear I would rather be celibate in perpetuity than risk a woman’s raised voice – or endure her icy disappointment. If the most important thing is to make others around you comfortable, then your entire moral and psychological system is built around external affirmation. If the greatest moral failing is to make someone else uncomfortable, then you create a code of conduct designed to minimize the chance of arousing anger, or fear, or embarrassment in anyone. It makes it difficult to discipline children. It makes it difficult to speak frankly to a woman who shares your bed.  

It also makes it difficult to figure out why that woman is in your bed. If your moral compass is external, then your libido may be as well.  When a woman wants you, then your own wanting is welcome. When a woman doesn’t want you, your wanting is considerably less enticing – and will almost certainly create awkwardness. So, you learn to desire in response to being desired. It’s not just vanity. It’s about making sure that everyone’s comfortable.

I have blamed this on my damaged brain, but I now wonder if it isn’t also partly a consequence of my deep embrace of the very moral system with which I was raised.  (No, mama, I am not blaming you.)

My conservative friends tell me that there is a political dimension to all this.  If your primary focus is to avoid frightening horses, eventually you need a reason why horse-frightening is wrong. “It upsets people” only leads to another question: Why is it wrong to upset people? What is it about other people that makes them so worthy of being made comfortable? Why would it be so wrong for that girl in the short shorts in Safeway to feel a boy’s eyes crawling on her?   If people are so deserving of being comfortable, surely it is because those people possess something intrinsically valuable. Is it “innate human dignity?” Where does that innate human dignity come from? Is it an evolutionary attribute, like an opposable thumb? Or is it something given by God? And if it is given by God, did that gift come with any other suggestions for how we ought to conduct ourselves?  Or is the only rule to simply leave those other souls alone?

It is a lonely and anxious summer in my life. As this past week has made clear, it is a hot and troubled summer for everyone else. Though I’m not yet ready to abandon the most precious of my priors, I realize that repeated pleas for civility and good manners seem grossly inadequate to the scale and the scope of both private and public present challenges.  The horses are frightened, and though we do need to soothe them, we also need to figure out if we can agree as to why they should be soothed.