Unbalanced approaches to one’s “own side”
ChastMastr
Shipmate
in Purgatory
What issues do people find that are unhealthy on one’s “own side,” particularly taking something you believe in and then going too far with it to an extreme, going in an unbalanced way with it, not seeing counterpoints on the “opposing side” that should be taken into consideration, etc.? This can be political, philosophical, religious, etc. I sometimes get the impression online that some don’t see anything missing in their own “bubbles,” whether red, blue, etc., and this has been particularly troubling in some of my own “bubbles.” Sometimes the only issue some people see is that their “side” doesn’t go far enough.
I’ll post some of my own, but I’d like to see some others’ thoughts on this as well first.
I’ll post some of my own, but I’d like to see some others’ thoughts on this as well first.
Comments
I've heard people going for job interviews advised to respond, 'I'm a perfectionist ...' to any question about their weak points.
Equally, I've known people in political or religious settings make a negative into a positive when asked to critique their own 'side'.
Some features can indeed be both positive and negative at the same time - both/and ...
There's a Russian saying, 'Greatness casts a long shadow.'
Very briefly, though, in terms of my own 'side' ecclesially there can be a tendency towards Pharisaisism and triumphalism. 'We are Orthodox, not like those heterodox people over there ...'
And politically, some liberals can be remarkably illiberal and intolerant.
The same has applied in spades to those who have leapt to the unconditional defence of the IDF and Hamas.
Indeed, but what about stuff we ourselves see on our own “sides”? I’ve been dealing with this with several of my own “sides” for a while, religious, political, philosophical, and otherwise.
Figuring out what "side" I'm on sometimes requires a kind of multivariate algebra that's frankly beyond me, because my joke of a "side" is a continually fractious confederacy of interests constantly bickering over petty and not-so-petty insults, given and received, in an environment where trust isn't cheap.
I don't really have a side, honestly. I have friends. And when my friends threaten each other, or refuse to acknowledge the way they come across to each other, it makes me angry.
I can't recall anyone outside the expected Islamicist voices in places like Iran who have leapt to an unconditional defence of Hamas.
There's a range for me of "If I lived in Palestine and had enough violent run ins with the IDF, I might see the logic of joining a militant group out of desperation," but to me that's a different circle of empathy than "I wholeheartedly support Hamas in its actions."
Most far leftists have a word for people who say violence is always justified for the cause, "Tankies." It's generally a term of derision. Do such people exist? Certainly. There are monsters in every demographic. But are they common? Not in my circles.
Would they describe Hamas as Tankies ?
No. That would be a category error.
I was going to post a longer response, but this one covers it. Hamas is an organization. "Tankie" is an insult directed at an individual person.
I also realize, on reflection (and a google) that "tankie" also carries a tinge of authoritarianism. So a Tankie is the kind of person who condones state violence in the interest of forcing a communist state. I think applying that specifically to Hamas en masse is a rather sloppy category error.
The general idea is that most people I know who are pro Palestinian don't like Hamas in a more than "well, they're currently the only power that exists in Palestine so Palestinians are kinda stuck with them" sense. We all hope for something better.
Here's a wikipedia page with some general info.
At the moment, I'm under constant pressure from the world that makes it really hard for me to be anything but incredibly balanced. I'm a father and a husband and a caretaker at my job. I have to be balanced. I can't afford not to be.
And I'm sure everyone has private lists of other people who are imbalanced. I think I have enough of a struggle minding my own balance. Trying to mind someone else's balance is more work than I need.
I think one area on the "team" thing that always gets to me a bit is that I'm kind of a natural conduit. For whatever reason, I've often had a loosely-attached sense of self and an openness to other people, which makes me good for listening and, weirdly, easygoing on my own. It can also make me a horrible person in a conflict because I earnestly try to get to see all sides and may find myself reflexively playing devil's advocate to people in the interest of honest and fair communication, whether it's wanted or not. I've learned to be very careful with this impulse.
I sometimes would think of myself as a sort of bridge-builder, but after seeing the way the world is going, I now sometimes feel more like a bridge troll who gets sick of people crapping all over his bridge and not cleaning up after themselves. But that's not to me an issue of balance. That's just people being themselves in an environment with conflicting interests and values. This is also why I find the topic of Israel/Palestine uniquely depressing. Everyone has their own grievances, enough to blanket the region in honest rancor. And I can't blame them because I honestly try to understand both sides and...yep. I can understand it, lucidly. If I lived there, I'd be ticked off too, and/or scared or experiencing any number of horrifying emotions.
See? Empathy can be a terrifying condition if you take an interest in politics.
Maybe because of this, I'm not good at identifying with a "team" or a "side." I can't stand the things. I'm fiercely loyal to individual people I care about, but once they start turning into "sides" I start checking out. I don't like wearing uniforms or identifying with cliques.
I feel like there's something you're trying to get out, and you're trying to lay the groundwork for it. What is it you're trying to get to? Is that enough to work with?
I think this is a big jump! I've not posted here because I have a lot of commitments in my life. I don't feel it necessary to respond to every thread. Your OP has got me pondering, and I am doing that on my walks, in conversations in my home, in my prayer.
I certainly DO see places where people I agree with seem too extreme for me. And even places where I know I'm not as balanced as I would like to be. But if all I contributed to the thread was that observation, I wouldn't be furthering the conversation; there's not much point in treating your OP like a poll and simply saying, "Yup, I see it too."
I think, for me, this is a topic that doesn't feel like one I want to engage publicly. That doesn't make it a fruitless thread, though!
I guess I'm reacting to a perceived judgement that I (and others?) are somehow bad because we're not engaging as you'd like us to. I may have entirely misunderstood, and if so, I would welcome being corrected! Perhaps all that happened was that your comment triggered my own crap...
And maybe there's some of what @Ruth said going on too. See above observation about not wanting to engage publicly.
Of course, if we feel tempted to keep silent when we should say something about "our" side, just because it's "ours," or even to just go along with the mob, that's an issue as well. (Not that there might not be times when waiting to jump in might not be wiser as well.)
I absolutely believe in bridge-building, myself. It's the absence of that which is one of the issues I'm thinking of here.
Oh heck no! It's more that most posts on the thread are about how other groups, not one's own, were doing that, unless I misunderstood, and people were talking about their own side with regard to Northern Ireland or Hamas or the IDF.
I'll bite the bullet early and give some examples from my own life (which I was going to do after a few more people did so, but if it's only me and @Gamma Gamaliel then I suppose I will need to do so to get things started) if no one else does. People have been seeing my positions on various things a lot lately and I don't want to make the thread all about me...
As I think in Israel Palestine - and I can at times identify with friends on either side of that one - sometimes there is very sincere disagreement on matters of deep substance and that's just what it is. People can see eye to eye, perfectly understand each other's views, but it's not going to lead to peace because these concepts just don't mesh. And it's a lot more painful when it's a matter of property, identity, land, etc. I guess that's the "side" thing.
What helps me is understanding my own situation and not expecting other people to be me. I'm a white American Christian. I've learned that it's unfair to have a categorical prejudice against Muslims. I once met a Christian from Pakistan who told me she was categorically terrified of Muslims. Since she had grown up in an Islamic theocracy, that's where she was from. I wasn't gonna accuse her of being "imbalanced." If I lived where she did, I might feel the same way. I'm privileged not to live there.
I guess that's the thing with balance. I'm pretty comfortable with myself, and - with effort - I can usually suss out someone else's reasons for thinking what they think, even if they voted for Donald Trump. Sometimes those reasons are terrible, but there's always internal logic because humans are generally logical monsters. I don't like accusing people of things like "imbalance" because it presume that I'm the judge.
But in another sense, we're all acting on stuff, and a little examination goes a long way. It's a very sensitive business.
Or the current push by the far right to promote “western civilization.” I’m a big fan of western civilization—the classics and so much more. I’m not happy about some of the de-emphasis on that in academia (I believe in both/and). But also I believe in recognizing when things were done wrong. (Colonialism, racial slavery, etc.) And now there’s this weird push to promote “western civilization” in a way that attacks other civilizations, other cultures, not only ignores things done wrong but actively tries to push them as great things (taking over other people’s countries and so on). Again, I want to see more of certain things, but not like that!
(My first college was New College in Sarasota, Florida, in 1985. I felt very much like an outcast for my faith, and for not (at the time) being politically liberal. But I’m horrified by what’s been done to it by DeSantis in the name of things I believe in. There’s been a kind of right-wing takeover in the name of “classical” education, plus other stuff.)
I’m politically very liberal (have been since the very late 1990s) but I’m disturbed by some people being okay with actual revolution, violence in protests, and such. (Some of this was discussed in the thread on the murder of the insurance CEO recently.)
Back when I wasn’t politically liberal but conservative, I was troubled by the way that, when the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal hit, despite the fact that Clinton had repented of and broken off the relationship before anyone had known about it, as a Christian, the ostensibly Christian Republicans used it as an opportunity to attack him, rather than treat him as a penitent brother in Christ. I was very naive at the time, but I was simply astonished at that. I thought despite our politics, that’s not how Christians were supposed to behave.
Similarly, again in the 1990s when I was politically conservative, when I encountered Rush Limbaugh, I was disturbed by him. Instead of saying where he thought his opponents were wrong, he attacked them and insulted them, and acted like there was no reason for them to be upset about any of the issues they talked about. I just… didn’t understand that.
Oh yeah. Back in the day (the 90s) I was struggling very much with simply hating the modern world, but after reading more very old stuff, I realized that the saints and monastics and such whom I revered would actually see many very good things in the present day, despite the things I disagreed with. (Indeed, it was reading very old books which ultimately--your mileage may vary--convinced me of more liberal politics than conservative, but that's a long story.) It also convinced me that bitterly resenting the era and place I was born into wasn't exactly the fruit of the Spirit. (There was a (now former) friend at the time who had some of the same concerns, and ... he went down a very dark path, I'll just say...) I need to try to remember to try to find the good in things even now (since we're in a very dark time here in the US) rather than dwell on the negative stuff, actually.
Yeah, that's a hard one for me, because I've always been a liberal and my churchmanship was pretty shallow as a kid. Looking at what passed for "intense" churchmanship when I was that age, that might've been for the better. Coming here probably roped me back into being more religious, and then seminary really kick started me, plus a few other influences hitting around the same time, each of which deserve their own essay. But that's another essay.
I have a running thing I say that "if I'd grown up in an evangelical church like some kids I knew in HS, I'd be an atheist by now." My left wing convictions have only gotten firmer as I've gotten older, but I've never in my life been anything remotely resembling a conservative. I think I might've posted earlier, but even when I was open to questioning the ethics of homosexuality, I couldn't see why people got so upset about two men having sex. It just didn't strike me as important in a world where real problems happened. If God wants to send them to hell for that, well, then God has questionable ethics and that's between them and God.
And now, from my situation, it's hard for me to feel any affection for "classical" western culture because I was never attached to it. I was never given a reason to feel invested. I'd rather shed it. When I was in college I was a minor japanophile via Aikido (per my old profile pic here if anyone remembers.) And I think part of that was just looking for something different because "my" culture made me itchy and uncomfortable. Plus when you grow up in a rural town you want to see something exotic. You want to go "somewhere else."
Now I think I'm more balanced, I live in an immigrant neighborhood in a major city and am reasonably cultured by association and reading. But I don't really feel like I have "a culture" to protect. I'm from a particular corner of central Appalachia, but I never really fit in there, so it's not really mine, even if I get prickly about dumb rural stereotypes.
And then, reading around, "dumb rural stereotypes" are a trope that's at least as old as the Roman Empire. You can find them in The Tale of Genji. They go back to The Epic of Gilgamesh, even. There are always hicks. I sometimes call myself one in jest, though really I grew up in a proper town. I know enough people who grew up in the real hollers to know better than to pretend I'm authentic. I'm not authentic. I'm a perpetual transplant, a mutt.
Religiously, I think God transcends culture, so I don't have any desire to protect any culture. They're all going to hell eventually: Gehenna, the eternally burning garbage dump of history. And we'll keep building new ones in the ruins of the old. It's what we do. It's how Tels get build. Tel Aviv, Tel-whatever. Tell your friends. There's a new town here, on top of a mound made up of the bones of thousands of old ones.
I feel like I was raised in a world that was dying and I had no choice but crawl out of it, and I just got lucky that I did. I don't want to see my kids' future strangled for the sake of a falsely sanctified past.
I think this is one reason I struggle with seeing myself as having "a side." My side is just trying not to die, and trying to limit the amount of human misery I am forced to witness for my refusal to close my eyes. And I refuse to close my eyes.
Modern medicine was indeed one of the things which I realized was something to rejoice about. I would still say, however, that the theological/philosophical matters are still a very important part of reality.
I’ve wondered sometimes if it was a blessing for me to come to Christianity from outside rather than be raised in it by my toxic parents, and have that negative association. On the other hand, I believe in paranormal things despite my mother’s obsession with them, so I don’t know. (And as Aslan says, no one knows what “would have happened.”)
Ah! More story time!
Yeah, I have a really weird family situation with that. My dad's a thoroughgoing agnostic. His parents were Christian Scientists, I think mostly according to his father's will. My mom is a low-church folk-Christian with major disabilities stemming from a car accident. There's a history of my dad's family (and others) not understanding or appreciating my mom's needs, overlapping with my mom sometimes being a bit controlling in her insecurity. Through all of this, I developed an intense hatred for prosperity gospel and any kind of "faith makes you well" theology. Then my dad, later one, would actually defend Christian Science to me as a product of its time and an early form of feminism, which is actually fair on the margins. There was a lot of loopy religion going around in the early 20th century.
And I grew up in the PCUSA church, but as I got older and my mom's physical ability deteriorated, my mom stopped attending, complaining that the church wans't willing to accommodate her intolerance for candles (epilepsy) or sitting for long stretches of time (spinal damage.) And later my dad stopped, they were a little offended by the way the pastor at the time addressed the matter. I kept showing up for the choir and, curiously, having a social space that wasn't my home.
This was a pretty boring, perhaps mildly conservative mainline church that studiously avoided politics and stuck to the good old "love God, love your neighbor" stuff. As an adult I learned via facebook that the pastor had good liberal sensibilities but he kept them to himself at the time and focused on the "be kind" side of things.
I used to fret about alternate timelines but having three kids, it's a bit late now for that.
God didn't stop the guy who was rage-driving the car my mom and aunt were in from steering into a ditch and leaving my mom >>>pinches fingers together<<< that far from being a paraplegic, living in a blast radius that included me.
The accident was before my birth. And the conversation was over a decade ago. I think I'm over it but I can feel the echoes of where I was. It's a kind of anger that comes easily to me.
I play enough video games to understand what the acronym RNG stands for "random number god" and why you should never, ever trust it, even if I've been rather lucky in my life.
God didn't cause the Tower of Siloam to fall on some people to make an example of them. Or the World Trade Center. Sometimes the world is just capricious like that, and terrifying. I can understand that for some people, ironically including my mom sometimes, it can be comforting to say that God has a hand in it, that there's some executive officer who is in control. But those meds don't really take for me. I don't like lying to make things feel better than they are. I like to be really clear about what's fictional.
I'm not sure I "go too far." I just really don't like the prosperity gospel because I've seen too much of the capricious distribution of misery to worship the author of it. I don't see God in that.
Unbalanced? Or accurate? Tough call, sometimes.
I suspect one of the issues that you're indirectly addressing on this thread is that of belonging.
I don't have a side of things that I do like or identify with, necessarily. But I certainly have things I don't like.
And that might be where the danger is.
As a liberal RC, I don't understand why so many fellow liberal RCs act like anything remotely resembling something that was done in the Church before Vatican II is trauma-inducing.
I am literally not sure what you’re referring to – are you talking about the whole thing involving sexual scandal that came out recently?
Yes, I’m taking for granted in this case the notion that one is in some way in a group or on a “side.” (Political, religious, Star Trek vs Star Wars, DC vs Marvel, etc.)
I'm identifying with everything in this and the previous post.
It's a bullshit filter for me. I can't identify with people who believe obvious self evident bullshit. I mean, obviously, don't get me started with Creationists, but more specifically in the context of places I could actually find myself:
"God will keep you safe". No He Won't. He doesn't keep people safe on a daily basis on a massive scale. People come to grief not only predictably because some idiot drives like a moron out of their tits on meth, but because a serious of unfortunate coincidences put them in the wrong place at the wrong time. If anything's underlying these coincidences, it ain't a God Keeping People Safe. The only theological way out I can see in it is Shit Happens.
Now, perhaps miracles can occur. I've never seen one. Perhaps they do. Perhaps God sometimes does something supernatural or apparently coincidental and someone is saved from some otherwise occurring disaster. But you can't say "God Will Keep You Safe" if it doesn't work all the time. You are making assumptions on God's behalf that he frequently3 fails to live up to. I can't stress this enough. God Keeping People Safe is not compatible with the observation that Shit Happens, and it clearly does.
But amazingly people still manage to say it or variations of it. It's bullshit.
I don't need people to agree with me, my tastes or my liturgical or musical preferences. But I can't cope with them talking bullshit and then coming down on me when I don't believe the same bullshit as "lacking faith" or some other - can I have another synonym for Bullshit please as I'm fed up of typing it.
Cobblers?
“Stuff I think is wrong”?
Insufficiently forceful
Nah. This is stuff that's objectively demonstrably wrong.
I've learned to accept that, after a certain point. But when someone says they got a material job because they felt God was doing them a personal favor...that rankles a bit.
And I have learned over time to be a bit more moderate in my attitude about that pet peeve of mine. Being able to self consciously observe that I have a clear trauma history with the question helps. A lot of times I think owning one's context can make a lot of things easier.
Well, I adhere to traditional notions of providence and occasional miracles, but that doesn’t mean I expect them on demand. Prosperity gospel stuff is, in my view, heresy.
Hugs regardless.
With the caveat of what I have said about “I statements” before on the board (and I don’t really want to drag the thread into that because I really want to see what people think about the actual topic), what about just “BS”?
Appreciated. I always keep the door open either way, but the bar for proof is pretty high. I know people who've claimed to have ecstatic experiences, but I'm comfortably careful of the numinous.