False Humility is Not a Virtue, and Malice is Worse than Concupiscence: Hiatus Thoughts

I’m just over halfway through this self-imposed hiatus, and I’m popping back in (or on?) to make three reasonably quick observations.

One.

 I don’t understand how anyone could vote for _____.

You can fill in the blank with Kamala Harris or Donald Trump. I’ll bet you’ve heard someone use this phrase at least once in recent months. Perhaps you’ve said it yourself.  It is almost always a disingenuous, if not outright dishonest, declaration.

 There are at least two different ways we proclaim we don’t understand something. One is simply an epistemological admission, such as “I don’t understand nuclear physics” or “I don’t understand Finnish.” They are admissions of one’s own limitations. You aren’t (generally) blaming the Finns for your inability to comprehend their language. You also, (generally) aren’t lying. Unless you’re some sort of secret agent, it’s unlikely you’d have a reason to pretend you didn’t understand Finnish.

Announcing that you don’t understand how someone could vote for Harris or Trump is altogether different. It’s a statement that declares your own moral purity. “I am such a thoughtful, informed, compassionate and educated person that I simply cannot conceive of the mental leap it would take to cast a ballot for such an appalling human being.”  Given that people – even people you know, shocking and upsetting as it is to your delicate heart – are voting for the Bad Person, you ascribe their decision to the lamentable absence of virtues that you yourself of course possess. “I am thoughtful, informed, compassionate and educated, and therefore I am voting for _____; you are voting for _____ because you are not thoughtful, informed, compassionate, or educated – or if you were once one or all of those things, you have been infected by the Great Lie.”

What I find so objectionable about the “I don’t understand” framing is that it dresses up sneering condemnation as naïveté. It is moral censoriousness hiding behind intellectual humility. It is very bad form. You should stop it.

Two.

That last sentence is not how I normally frame things. On this hiatus, I’ve realized how often I hide my views behind my life experiences, my upbringing, and above all, my physical and psychological traumas. I write a great deal about manners, for example, but I always structure the argument around a story of how I was raised. I’ll say things like, “In the WASP culture in which I marinated, we believed x.”  “X” might mean just matching your belt to your shoes, or it might mean being curious, polite, calm and non-judgmental even in the face of provocations. I might believe that the latter should be a universal virtue, but if I say so, I fear the reaction will be negative. So, I frame it as radically subjective. You can’t argue with how I was raised, after all.

I do the same thing with my brain injury, or my history of sex work and abuse, or my addictions, or the calamitous way I blew up my teaching career.  All of these things were traumas of one sort or another. If I attribute my deep dislike of anger to my traumas, you can’t very well argue with that, either. You can say, “Well, Hugo, you need to get over that, old boy” or you can say, “It’s a bloody miracle you’ve made it this far.”  I get sympathy, and I get understanding, but I’ve also buried sincere convictions underneath those traumas. I think EVERYONE should be less angry, less judgmental, more forgiving, and more patient with each other. I think civility is a universal good, not just a culturally specific practice. I have been too cowardly to come right out and say that, however – so I disguise my beliefs behind anecdotes about my family and stories about the consequences of a very severe concussion. 

We are told to write what we know. Most of us know ourselves reasonably well – or at least, better than we know other people. Intellectual modesty compels some of us to stick to the thing of which we are most certain – like our families, our love lives, our passions, our terrors. The danger is that all this humility and politeness can conspire to make one incapable of saying what one actually believes. That has been true in my case. I was raised in a particular way with particular values, and I have a brain injury and a colorful past. But that doesn’t mean that every damn thing I think or believe is solely a manifestation of my upbringing and my assorted traumas. It’s recklessly reductive to think so, and it makes debate and constructive dialogue impossible.  So, I need to be braver. Maybe, just maybe, I believe something because it’s verifiably true, and not merely because half my frontal lobe was crushed against a marble floor thirty-seven years ago.

Three.

And then there’s the story of Olivia Nuzzi, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, Keith Olbermann, and Ryan Lizza.  Nuzzi is a highly regarded and immensely talented journalist; Lizza was her fiancé (and fellow reporter); Olbermann is a notorious old scoundrel and Bobby Kennedy is… well, Bobby is older still, and more notorious yet. When Lizza discovered that Nuzzi had had some sort of sexual relationship (perhaps only via phone) with RFK, he apparently blackmailed his own now-former fiancée. CNN reported:

Nuzzi said she believes Lizza began his alleged harassment at the beginning of July, as a way to blackmail her back into a relationship with him and punish her when she wouldn’t acquiesce.

She said by the next month, Lizza had stolen a personal electronic device from her, was hacking her devices, then anonymously shopping information about her to the media. Some of the information may have been “doctored” to hurt her more.

Meanwhile, Kennedy – who has now hitched his caboose to the Trump Train – insists that the much-younger Nuzzi was harassing him with sexy photos, all against his will. It is a preposterous claim from a man infamous for making many bizarre confessions.

If I recall my medieval scholasticism correctly, it was St. Thomas Aquinas who drew a distinction between sins of malice and sins of concupiscence. Sins of concupiscence are what happen when we surrender to impulse, desire, and appetite. Sins of malice, on the other hand, have two distinct qualities. First, they are acts intended to hurt another person – and second, they are acts for which the sinner feels no guilt. When people cheat out of lust or steal out of greed, they know what they are doing is wrong. They know they can’t really justify what they have done. They acknowledge their weakness.

When people, say, expose each other to public ridicule, they do so convinced that their malice is justified, perhaps even required, for the sake of the public good. The adulterer knows where he or she falls short. The outraged ex-fiancé does not.  The concupiscent sinner knows they are in the wrong and grieves their own weakness; the malicious sinner believes their cruelties necessary and righteous.  Concupiscence reminds us of our all-too-human frailty. Malice puts a costume on sadism and calls it long-overdue justice.

The urge to punish others, or to get even, is arguably the darkest and most indefensible of human longings. If your satisfaction rests on someone else’s humiliation, comeuppance, or suffering? You have fallen far, far shorter of the mark than they did.  (Dante and Aquinas both got this right.) Olivia Nuzzi is far more sinned against than sinning, and the caddish behavior of Messrs. Kennedy and Lizza deserves far greater scorn than it is getting.  

Back to hiatus.