Who Are You Calling We? The Dangers of Certainty and Exclusion

On Thursday, this sentence in a New York Times summary of a Chelsea Handler interview caught my eye.  (I wasn’t the only one to notice.)

Chelsea Handler says men are ‘on probation’ — at least the ones who don’t seem to grasp how the country’s social justice movement is reshaping how we talk about, well, everything.

Bold emphasis mine.

Let me take a minute or two to play Tonto to the Lone Ranger of the Times.

It’s not hard, though, to imagine the answer.  “We” are urban, educated, left-of-center.  “We” are not likely to be passionate about our religious faith, Professional Bull Riding, lifted pickup trucks, or Joe Rogan’s podcast.  The “we” to which the Times refers are the mostly affluent, mostly white, suburban folks who have in recent years put this sign up in front yards from Braintree to Brentwood:

People like creeds, and this one is shorter than the Nicene, which does not fit as easily on the yard sign. If you spend time in a Catholic or Episcopal Church, you’ll recite some version of the Nicene Creed each Sunday, and just like that yard sign and Chelsea Handler, you’ll boldly profess “We believe” rather than “I believe.”  There is plenty of swagger in the first-person plural, and it’s the power to say “Listen, buster, this is more than just my personal opinion – this is what a lot of us believe, and it’s what we think you should too.”

If you have doubts about your theological or political convictions, you can subsume those suspicions into the certainty of the larger group. If some day you start to wonder what that “Science is Real” part of the yard sign on your lawn means (as it seems that “real science” can often lead to wildly different conclusions), you can trust that the rest of your household knows what it means, and you can bite back your doubts.  Besides, the people who are NOT WE – the Deplorable Others – they’ll just take advantage of any doubt you express.  Better to recite the slogan, and comfort yourself that even in your uncertainties, you are part of a bigger and better “we,” one filled with the unbearable confidence of rightness.

I didn’t grow up religious, but I grew up with folk songs.  In the car, on drives from Carmel to the ranch, mama sometimes sang the old spiritual “We Shall Not Be Moved.”  (Though some have recorded it with “I” as the first word, it is best known in the plural.)  I would think of the farm workers organizing a few miles away in Salinas, and tear up as I tried to sing along with mom:

The union is behind us, we shall not be moved,
The union is behind us, we shall not be moved,
Just like a tree that's planted by the river,
We shall not be moved.

We weren’t actually on the picket lines – we were just driving from a charming seaside village to a bucolic country retreat – but we were in solidarity with Cesar Chavez. “We” would outlast the growers and the bosses, even if those growers and bosses were, um, us.  I liked feeling the emotion course through me, even if I had doubts about the framing between the just and the wicked.

By the time I graduated high school, I was suspicious of certainties. I wanted to belong, but I didn’t want to belong to any group that painted the world in binaries. 

I was not in a fraternity for long at Berkeley, but like every boy who pledges a house at Cal, I had to learn the words to the school drinking song.  I sing it to the children sometimes.  An excerpt:

For California, for California,
The hills send back the cry,
We're out to do or die,
For California, for California,
We'll win the game or know the reason why.

And when the game is over,
We will buy a keg of booze,
And drink to California
'till we wobble in our shoes.

I liked that song from the moment I learned it, perhaps chiefly because it didn’t make moral claims.  It is a profession of entirely arbitrary love for a university and a football team.  “We’ll win the game or know the reason why” is a happy anticipation of predictable and near-certain defeat.  The song is an affectionate admission that other teams were likely to be better than ours.  We are Cal; and it’s perfectly okay if you’re Ohio State, or USC, or Auburn folk – we are singing of our particular, subjective, relative love, and we do not ask that you join us. 

Let me anticipate the objection.  You’ll say that reducing every significant moral claim to a matter of personal or familial preference, like rooting for the Dodgers rather than the Giants, is to pretend that we are not locked in an existential struggle for justice and the very survival of the planet.  You’ll say that when the Dodgers and Giants play a baseball game, or Cal and Stanford meet on the football field, they share the same understanding of the rules of the game.  That’s not what things are like now, you’ll say:

We are fighting against the Trumpers, and we don’t have a common frame of reference with them!  They don’t believe in science, or love, or facts, or any of the sentiments on our yard sign!  We must defeat them, or all will be lost!  The planet itself is at stake.

The Times article on Chelsea Handler doesn’t go quite that far, but it certainly presumes that we are agreed that decency and morality require that we change how we speak.  There is a reckoning afoot, and in that overused and tiresome phrase, it is once again a time for choosing, and if you are our kind of people, you will choose to do the inner and outer work we require.  If nothing else, we demand that you change how you speak about race, sex, and power – or you’ll be on probation, or left behind, or cast out.

I’ll concede the stakes are higher than a football game. I’ll concede too that there is great pleasure in sitting in the choir, and listen to the preacher deliver a message that reinforces all the things you already suspected.   There is pleasure in reciting creeds together, and posting yard signs that align with your neighbor’s views.  There is pleasure in watching MSNBC, or reading most any of the columnists in the Times, and being reminded of the considerable satisfactions and frustrations of being on the right side of history.  I’ll concede that the cult of personality in the Republican party, with its embarrassing genuflections to the disgraced former president, is a scandal and a stain on American life.

But what now?  We still must live with those who are not-we, and the more we put up our earnest yard signs, the more they fly their Trump flags. The more we demand that the reckoning push its way into every nook and cranny of public life, the more they push back.  There are tens of millions who are NOT WE, and you are not going to succeed in changing their minds, nor in creating a society from which they are entirely excluded. 

We have no choice but to find a way to remain committed to our principles while staying in relationship with those who do not see the world as we do.  My friends on the left say they believe in science and reality, but their faith (and it is faith) that somehow, they’ll be able to ostracize or shame or compel 75 million Trump voters into moral and epistemological epiphanies is laughably naïve.  We – and here, it is the universal we -- must find a way to live together, and we must make that project of living together peaceably as urgent as the project of protecting our planet from the ravages of climate change.

About ten years ago, my friend Sam went to a Dodgers game with his kids.  The boys in blue were playing the Giants, and Sam and his family were seated right next to a group decked out in the orange and black of the visiting San Francisco team.  Things got tense, and at one point, Sam and the father of the Giants clan very nearly came to blows.  “I was so worked up,” Sam said, “I terrified my kids with my anger.”

At the end of the game, which the Giants won, Sam took the risk and went up to the other dad. My friend apologized, and the other father apologized in return.  They shook hands.  “We’re both dads,” the other man told Sam; “but I couldn’t see you were just like me beneath that blue hat.”

Their families ended up keeping in touch, and sitting together in good-natured rivalry at subsequent Giant-Dodger games.

Again, we’re dealing with much bigger conflicts than sports.  But our collective survival hinges not on compelling others to see as we do, but in recognizing our common humanity with those who will always see the world differently.  That’s not naïveté – that’s survival.