Intellectual generosity

I love John McWhorter. There’s something just deeply attractive and loveable about that man.

Having said that, John MacWhorter suffers from one enormous flaw. And it’s a flaw for which he is to be admired. He judges the world by giving other people the same credit he would to himself. It’s noble, it’s careful, it’s fair, and it represents his greatest flaw as a thinker, a profound failure of imagination.

Some people would use the word naive. But people use that term in such a limited manner. What if someone’s only great flaw waa that they were so much better than everyone else, so good and cautious and well-meaning and earnest and dedicated and pleasant and hard-working and kind, that they couldn’t even imagine anyone else being otherwise? Especially deliberately. Or that, even if they were not being deliberately degenerate, that those people’s well-intentioned attitudes and actions would not ultimately turn out well. He gives his opponents so much credit.

I once mentioned this concern of mine to my wife, who was listening to John talk. “Then he’s wrong to be fair and balanced?” she asked. And I had to think hard about that. Partly about what my answer was, and partly about what the question really meant. My wife is a very admirable person. In fact she reminds me immensely of John. They both have a love of linguistics, and both are sterling examples of the optimistic, morally upright, hardworking descendents of the German pietists.

But both of them are also descended from the MacWhorters, which spins a thread of stubborn independence and waywardness through them. Perhaps that’s merely a coincidence, but I have always known my wife to be a bit at war with herself, as her wilder, more passionate side struggles to express itself through the intense orderliness of her public face. I have also found this same tendency of John’s in my wife, to judge others as if they were herself. As wise and earnest and fair and well-meaning as herself.

As a structural approach, this is a very praiseworthy and useful thing to do. It’s something most people need to learn to do better. Just, not my wife, and not John MacWhorter.

Because the simple fact is that most people are not remotely like them. They give the rest of humanity far more credit than they deserve by comparing other people to themselves. And so although it is a morally praiseworthy act to think in such a manner, it is not an epistemologically praiseworthy act.

This brings us back to my wife’s question. Is John wrong to be so fair and balanced? I think my wife meant the question as she thinks, ethically. She strives to live well; she judges herself constantly. And because she is such a harsh judge and must prove her worthiness before the universe so strenuously, she behaves in a way that is both morally blameless and also terrifically productive (she’s an amazing person and model employee).

And to that question, an ethical question, “Is it not morally praiseworthy to be so careful and cautious and fair in your estimation of the intentions of others?” I have to say, yes. What a fine fellow he is to behave in such a way.

But he’s also often wrong, is my complaint. And personal moral ambition to be generous to others may be admirable in its earnestness but still wildly miss the mark of truth, in part because of its earnestness. The final goal is, after all, to grasp the truth. So there’s no point in saying that you’ve been fair and balanced in your presentation of the situation if the situation itself and the people involved are not, in fact, fair or balanced.

The problem with judging people as if they were you, in this particular case, is that both my wife and John are such extremely uncommon cases. It’s like judging all dogs, what you expect them to be like, how they will behave, what they’re capable of, purely on the basis of Lassie. Exceptions make for interesting case studies but make for very bad rules. And in this case we have got hold of the exceptions, leading us to impute to a whole class of people traits that are actually fairly exclusive, while ignoring fairly common traits that most of us share. I’m not like my wife. I’m petty, aggressive, deceitful, lazy, selfish, and full to the brim of self-importance. And most people are more like me than they are like my wife, in my experience.

Perhaps it does us little credit to have such a low opinion of one’s fellow man, sir! Well, that’s a good ethical argument for embracing naiveté, but for all its generosity it doesn’t fix the epistemological problem, which is inaccuracy. Most people are far more petty, far more dangerous, more extreme, more lazy, more selfish, more thoughtless, and just generally far more capable of voluntary and involuntary wrongdoing than fine people like John and my wife. I admire them for their qualities, but I don’t remotely imagine that they are in any way remotely representative of an average human. If anything they’re bizzare specimens most people consider mythical, like a unicorn.

And when it comes to judging other people and their ideas, that’s actually a serious problem. You can’t actually present a “fair and balanced” picture of things in an epistemological sense of you’re not actually capable of conceptualizing the realities of what other people are, in fact, like. If you don’t have an actually reasonable account of human nature. And the consequences of being epistelogically corrupt are more than epistemological and theoretical. They often turn out to be quite practical and ethical. When you don’t know or speak the truth you are very likely to do harm or fail to achieve good.

I’ve often speculated about the origin of this particular form of blindsight on the part of my wife. She’s almost comically unable to conceive of how anyone could actually do or think or be the kinds of things that so many of us do and think and are. She wants to believe the best of people. In some odd way I think she is compelled to, because she sees the moral order of the universe as so palpable a structure and herself as so terribly exposed to its censure. The confidence of others must surely be born out of their own excellence and security before those demands, right?

This is merely a personal opinion, but I would guess that people of a hyper-ethical, highly orderly, high-conscientiousness bent are not at all well-integrated, generally, with their Jungian shadow, the personification of their own dark and dangerous side. In part because the idea of such an identity within them is so threatening and so hateful that it cannot even be countenanced. To allow it to approach would be to risk destruction of the very edifice that holds the censure of the universe at bay, their sanctity. And in a way, the shadow has been hidden from them by being exaggerated into a comic version of itself, imperfection. And if you don’t understand the horror of that words, then you haven’t met a person like John or my wife.

In a personality like this, the true basis of the shadow has been hidden, while the terror of it has been relocated to something more benign and approachable, but no less terrible for all that, the specter of imperfection. To have not done your utmost, to not be blameless. This mild phantom that most of us live with as the default state of things, is, for the upright, a horror not to be borne. Such a spirit must hang over them always in a most conspicuous manner, as it takes so little to invite it in, only the merest laspe in perfection.

And this, you will see, is why people like John and my wife make for excellent moral exemplars, but suffer certain handicaps of their epistemological vision. They can’t see beyond the specter of their own worst instincts, which are personified best as “imperfection”. That’s a failure of imagination. Because imperfection isn’t the real risk, the real shadow, the real spectrum of possibility.

These upright people still have a shadow, but are not very well acquainted with it, although they think they are, because they live in daily existential horror of the specter of imperfection. But there is a real shadow in them, as there is in all humanity. And until you have become acquainted with it, you cannot truly grasp the nature or possible depths of evil, either within yourself or within someone else.

It’s a curious fact that my wife genuinely doesn’t want to know just how bad other people are. She doesn’t want to see it. Interestingly, she’s spent a lot of time working for non-profits where you can’t avoid seeing and hearing about a lot of terrible things quite regularly, but she has always surrounded herself with the “good people”, the hard workers, and the people who are trying to do good as well as do well. Charities don’t merely seek to observe the sad facts of the world or ponder them philosophically, they are optimistic in nature. They are full of people trying to change things, to make them better. They are full of hopeful action. And that, in many ways, matters more for one’s outlook than the fact of all the bad things. There is always the hope that you will reduce and perhaps even conquer them by your efforts. And that is the optimistic morality of the conscientious mind.

Let’s not kid ourselves. We would all be very, very poorly off if we did not have these people. But for all the immense good that they do and have done throughout history, if they have one flaw it is that they are uniquely ill-equipped for conceptualizing their own true capacity for danger and evil, their shadow. And that means they are also limited in their ability to understand it in others. That probably helps to keep them sane. They couldn’t maintain either their optimism nor their earnestness if they did not possess such a blindness. And many of them fight every day against chaos and evil, just because of the sort of people they are, because they cannot understand or accept it and wish to make what is crooked straight.

In the same way that those of us with a more integrated (and perhaps more cynical and accommodating) view of ourselves and others are reliant on these upright people to keep caring, keep striving, keep believing and doing our best, they are reliant on us to guard and protect that earnest optimism from exploitation and vulnerability and lack of perspective.

But those efforts probably won’t be well-received. They will likely be seen as a kind of moral evil, doing other people an unkindness. They will seem like pessimism and stirring up fear and doubt, as harshness and baseness and extremism. But the problem is, people are base, people are harsh, people are extreme. And if you approach a system with assumptions that are grossly inaccurate about the actual components of that system, you will make bad judgments and predictions. You will expose the system and your work to unforeseen dangers.

As unkind as a more skeptical view of other humans might be (and I am not advocating cynicism), it is even more unkind to allow people to be harmed by the false assumption that people (or their ideas or actions) are harmless. The problem with being fair and balanced is that people aren’t.

Often the reality is, not only are many people not going to be cautious and balanced and circumspect and carefully skirt the edges, avoiding any imperfection, many of them have already gone way further down the road of danger and disaster than you ever imagined. Not only is it not impossible that some people will take that nice idea of yours, that bit of license, and not use it perfectly, there’s probably already a far larger contingent who have embraced the extremity of the worst abuses of where it could go. Places you never imagined.

That, I think, if why we have different types of people. We all have our fatal flaws, or our innate vulnerabilities and blind spots, our own areas where we are weak. The solution to that problem is other people, and our relationships with one another. John and my wife are in almost every way superior to me, but in those small areas where they are inferior, behold, these are people whose strengths match their weaknesses and whose weaknesses match their strengths.

The doctrine that “no one is good but God” isn’t a theological axiom so much as it is a practical observation. Only that which is everything at once is without flaw. Anything less is always subject to the limitations and corruption of its own particularity. Only God possesses the kind of complete internal relationship and union of all that brings perfect balance and harmony. And that is why marriage is a picture of the divine, because it is a tangible union of the finite into something more complete and interrelated and fundamentally productive.

It’s terribly easy for us to resent and criticize others for their shortcomings, many of which are directly consequent of their greatest strengths, while puffing up our own strengths and ignoring our own consequent weaknesses. What is better is to learn. To learn to see what we do well, and how that innately makes some things hard for us, and to learn what others do well and what is hrd for them. That way we can come to value and respect one another for those very things that create tension between us, while sheltering one another’s vulnerabilities within the fortress of each other’s strengths.