Values and Noncompliance

Robert Mann, in his substack today, articulates many of my own thoughts about Bishop Budde's message this last week. He also quotes from Kristin Du Mez's substack, where she collects several right-wing criticisms of Budde. Most boil down to (1) she disrespected the president and the event, and (2) she's a bad person and a bad representative of Christianity. 

Much of the latter criticism relates to her gender. A good bit of US evangelicalism (the Southern Baptist segment, mainly) opposes ordaining women for pastoral leadership or preaching. (Other streams of evangelicalism, e.g., Pentecostals, believe differently.)   "Women's ordination," tweeted Reformed professor Joe Rigney, "is a cancer that unleases [sic?] untethered [sic?] empathy in the church (and spills over into society).”* 

I concur with Mann's assessment:

I cannot imagine more loving and gentle words from a pastor to a president. She was full of respect for Trump and his position. Her words overflowed with all the love and concern for the oppressed that Jesus commanded.

Mann goes on to recommend a book by Budde, How We Learn to Be Brave: Decisive Moments in Life and Faith. I'll have to get that.

A different writer I follow, Timothy Burke (the professor, not Tim Burke the journalist), also wrote today about brave, decisive moments--moments of noncompliance. Specifically, Burke criticizes the wave of administrative compliance with new (Trump administration) directives, such as those gutting DEI programs. The force of administrative compliance in a complicated bureaucracy like a university, Burke warns, creates its own unthinking momentum: 

What has hidden inside many compliance regimes is the misuse of compliance to justify voluntary, values-driven, sometimes blatantly ideological interpretations of legal and regulatory requirements and to shield those decisions from any questioning. 

The response, Burke suggests, involves clarifying and acting on personal, professional, and institutional values. In the absence of rules or regulatory bodies to ensure equality, diversity, and inclusion, Burke argues, we must choose to do these things ourselves not out of administrative compliance but because they're the right things to do. It's right to recognize and redress systemic injustices and inequalities. It's right to make the necessary trade-offs to ensure wide accessibility and representation in our institutions and disciplines. 

Such a need for re-valuing values offers an opportunity for faith. The world where religion (and the Christian Church especially) feels itself becoming increasingly irrelevant is also the world in which one set of values/worldviews (white cis-het masculinist evangelical nationalism) presents itself as the only game in town and expects mute compliance. Against this expectation, Christians like Budde get to say, decisively, bravely: No. There are other values, deeper and richer sources of being that connect us to the whole human community, that align us with the Creator's love for all humanity, that take as their model the Redeemer's life of service and sacrifice. 

Noncompliance with the expectations of Trumpian nationalism will read as disrespect, no matter how gently they are phrased.

More tomorrow.

*I was confused here. What's wrong with empathy? So I did a bit of research. A Fellow at New Saint Andrews College, Rigney, I learned, has publicly criticized empathy as a sinful corruption of Christian compassion. Here's my first-impression summary of his take: whereas Christian compassion cares for the good of the suffering person, empathy (in Rigney's view) cares for the feelings of the suffering person. I can see how such a view would help buttress an opposition to LGBTQ+ rights. I'm guessing the reasoning goes something like this: queer and trans folk are confused about what's good for them. Christian cis-het orthodoxy is good; queerness is harmful. Queer/trans folk say that their feelings are natural and good, insisting that those who do not tolerate their expressions of identity and orientation wrong them because they deny queer/trans feelings. Christian compassion a la Rigney would lovingly insist on cis-het Christian holiness. To be pro-queer, as Bishop Budde is, in Rigney's view represents a sinful displacement of compassion by secular empathy, caring about the queer person's feelings rather than for their temporal and eternal good. That's my guess, anyway. I of course disagree, but that's a different post. I'm less certain how calling for mercy for immigrants (not acceptance, not amnesty--mercy) commits a similar sin.

Empathy, a tired ramble

Speaking of empathy...(a tired ramble after a day of travel).

Two instances of empathy:

I wrote my second rejection letter for an article in my capacity as editor (co-editor). This one stung. The author had gotten feedback and had put work into revising. I inherited the article--and found I could not in good conscience publish it. That. Sucks.

It's highly unusual to invest in the time/effort of anonymous readers, have the author revise according to their comments, and then reject the revised draft. It's kinda bad form. From the author's point of view, it's a slap in the face. If your article gets rejected off the bat, a desk rejection? That you could chalk up to a mismatch between the article and the journal. Even negative reader reports--well, they can flatten you. Still, though, there are the consolations of "well, at least I tried" or even "They just didn't get what I was doing. I wonder who that reader was? I bet it was . . ." But the second time, after you've revised and resubmitted? After you've done everything asked of you? A rejection there feels more like, well, your fault. You're just not good enough.

I hate feeling that way. I hate that the author I'm writing to will feel that way. At least, I imagine they'll feel that way. That's the tricky thing about empathy. Growing up, I thought of empathy as a super-power, like Diana Troi from Star Trek: The Next Generation. She'd squinch up her face or flinch or look generally uncomfortable. Then she'd utter, "I feel . . . great pain." Empathy was telepathy, but for feelings. It was often vague, and the screenwriters frequently seemed to forget the character possessed it. But when it worked, it was infallible.

Real empathy is all in your head. It's imaginary. I don't know what the other person is feeling. I think I do based on how I think I would feel in their situation. "Vicarious introspection," psychologist Heinz Kohut defined it. I'm imagining what the other person must be feeling. Even that turn of phrase--must be--hides the essential leap of faith we call empathy. The newer neuro-cognitive brain imaging that shows mirror neurons firing remains good old-fashioned imagining, just on an unconscious level. I see a clip of someone who slips on the ice and falls on hard their butt, and I flinch, a sympathetic shock shooting through my hindquarters. I don't know the person actually felt pain. They might be faking, or at least overdoing it. Maybe the video cuts short so that I don't see the aftermath of their impact at all.

Vicarious introspection. We see into others by seeing into ourselves.

The thing is, we're famously awful at introspection. Humans, most of us, aren't all that great at assessing ourselves. We're not transparent to ourselves. We misperceive our strengths and weaknesses.

Just before writing this I was taking as shower after an (inadequate) workout. I looked in the mirror at myself, spotlighting the flabby, unattractive parts. And I thought about my toiletries bag . . . which I realized with sinking certainty I had left hanging in my bathroom at home.

At this point, I don't even get angry at myself for such lapses. There's just a weary disappointment. Again, John? I guess we just need to adapt to the new reality: You Will Always Forget Something Vital. And I began planning a trip to the CVS tomorrow morning to get toothpaste, toothbrush, deodorant (which you just put into the toiletry bag this morning, right, John? I added).

Wait, I cautioned myself. Let's just make sure. I dried off, walked out of the bathroom, and looked into my open-faced suitcase. There it was.

Gosh, we're hard on ourselves, I thought.

I wonder sometimes if the way I talk to myself, my own frequently negative self-regard, has an effect on my ability to be empathetic to others. What if I treat others not as I want to be treated but as I actually treat myself?

Yeeg. There's a sobering thought.

More on Invisibilia's End of Empathy Episode

I finished the Invisibilia episode about "The End of Empathy" I was listening to. My problems with it remain.

To recap, series regular Hanna Rosen gives prospective producer Lina Misitzis an assignment: turn her interview with former incel Jack Peterson into a typical Invisibilia piece. Misitzis balks. We first hear Rosen's side of things, in which Peterson relates an odd altercation with a girlfriend (M) he had when he was a teenager. That experience, in his telling, drove him into the arms of incel culture. Violent acts by self-identified incels drove him out of that culture, and he relates that he's in a better place now.

Then we hear Misitzis's version, which highlights how alarming, abusive, and scary Peterson's behavior was. Rosen's (and Invisibilia's) empathy-for-Peterson approach, in Misitzis's view, gives too much uncritical spotlight to Peterson's self-serving version of events. This "himpathy" replicates larger patterns of sidelining female victims of male abuse and stalking.


This is a legitimate point. Peterson's story, even in Rosen's version, is thoroughly messed up. Obsessed with this woman who has told him she's not interested in him (and who, as Misitzis underlines, has no voice in this narrative), Peterson flies across the country to show up unannounced at her house. She makes him strip to his undies to make sure he has no weapons. She's afraid of him. And Peterson, even now, paints himself as the victim of abuse.

And yet. Misitzis does a thing that I have significant problems with. She replays Peterson's taped account, interspersing it with another voice, a woman's voice. The woman's voice describes her side of being the victim of extreme stalking behavior by a man. Misitzis turns Peterson's monologue into a duologue. They aren't exactly interacting, but it sets up a tennis-match back-and-forth between the he said/she said.

Here's the problem, the woman's voice isn't M, Jack's former girlfriend. It's "J." Here's a snippet from the NPR transcript:

MISITZIS: I don't have the voice of Jack's ex, but I do have a whole choir of women's voices in my address book. And after just a few phone calls, I start feeling like their experiences are all interchangeable. One in particular stands out. She's a writer in California. I'll call her J. For many years, J dated someone volatile and abusive.
J: I mean, it was a lot of sexual assault, verbal assault, the whole nine yards.
MISITZIS: J's ex sounds a lot like Jack. And her story about him sounds so similar to the one that Jack tells, I'm going to just play the two beside each other. And by the way, we did get this verified.
PETERSON [JACK]: I actually broke up with her because she was just, like, bitchy all the time.
M: There was one day where he called me probably 40 or 50 times while I was at work.
PETERSON: Then a couple of days later, I was like, look. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have tried to break up with you. But she just wasn't listening, and she wasn't answering my calls.
M: He called 50 times and was threatening to hurt himself - which he had done before.
PETERSON: I would say like, I'm going to f***ing jump off the building tomorrow if you don't stay with me.
M: So eventually, I did pick up. And he said, I know you're dating someone. I know you're seeing someone. You don't understand. You can't do this. I'm coming now.

Do you see what happens? J's voice turns, in the transcript, into M's voice. But it's not M speaking; it's J. Of course this is a rush transcript, NPR includes disclaimers about mistakes and whatnot. But even as I listened to the episode, even with Misitzis's quick explanation at the start, I got a little mixed up about just who was interrupting Peterson's narrative with her own side of things. It seems like Misitzis got M's side of things. But she didn't. She got an account of a woman who had been abused in what Misitzis suggests is a similar way to what M had suffered.

I think the intent here is admirable: pointing out how Peterson's account is leaving out a hugely important perspective. But the tactic here strains journalistic ethics. J's voice replaces the absent M, making it seem like their experiences are identical. But we don't actually know that. I agree it's a reasonable guess, and I can see how the back-and-forth makes for compelling radio. But it sneaks in some facts that aren't facts. It is a fact ("we did get this verified"--what's the this? J's story?) that J suffered from a guy who called her "probably 40 or 50 times while I was at work." But we have no indication M suffered that same thing from Peterson. We have nothing beyond Misitzis's assertion that J's story "sounds so similar to the one that Jack tells, I'm just going to play the two beside each other." She felt that they were the same, so they became the same.

That's...shenanigans. It's taking the worst example of a guy's behavior (well, not the worst--but a very bad example) and cutting-and-pasting it to apply to a whole other person. It is at least uncareful.

The bit also glosses over some other facts about Peterson's situation, facts that--without exonerating his behavior (which, again, was abusive)--at least make the situation more complicated. There's the fact, for instance, that M began a relationship with Peterson when he was 12 and she was 17. It was online. He said he was 14. That's...extremely messed up. We do not generally exonerate the older person in this kind of relationship because they thought the person they were talking to was 14 instead of 12. It's slippery at best to do so here.

And frankly that's another thing that gets glossed over here. Peterson was a teenager when he did all this stuff (the hacking into M's account, the flying across the nation to see her). M was in her twenties. That doesn't make it right. That doesn't make it not-scary for M. Plenty of teenagers can be terrifying. But it does suggest that the whole situation was quite a bit messier than J's experience seems to have been. (Did J begin a romantic relationship with a child?)

The whole segment makes me feel yucky. I had considered using this episode for class. Now I'm not sure.

The worst part is that what I see as the iffy ethics of Misitzis's dramaturgical tactic here undercuts the really important point about how easily empathy gets used to privilege male abusers' feelings and perspectives. The story prompts me to root for the extremely messed-up guy who engaged in abusive behaviors. I feel like I'm tone-policing. Or sea-lioning. Or some other bit of nasty behavior men do to make excuses for men accused of abuse.

I'm frustrated. I think that, since M's account isn't available, maybe the better thing to do would have been not to share Peterson's story at all--or at least not in the way it was shared. I agree that his version of things shouldn't go unchallenged. But Peterson's being an abusive creep in this scenario does not excuse making him seem like a much scarier, more extreme version of abusive creep--at least not without substantiation, and not without also acknowledging the creepiness of the, well, pedophilia going on here from M's end.

I feel dirty, not thoughtful. And not empathetic.

That Invisiblilia Episode on Empathy

I referred yesterday to an Invisibilia episode from this last April, "The End of Empathy." It got name-checked in the dramaturg's introduction to Heroes of the Fourth Turning, a play by Will Arbery in which white conservative Catholic characters debate the place of empathy in Trump-era conservatism. The Ann Coulter-ish Teresa argues strenuously against empathy, sounding some of the same notes as Sohrab Ahmari has. Basically, we're sick of empathy.

I've written previously about empathy at conferences before. Empathy has long been registered as one of the primary benefits of theatre. Since acting is by nature a matter of stepping into another person's shoes, and since so many plays are about getting the inside view of someone else's perspective, empathy is a primary tool theatre folk like me use.

But, for such an integral-to-the-craft notion, empathy is fairly recent. The term is just a little over a hundred years old unless you attach it to the related-but-not-quite-the-same term sympathy. It's  terminally vague and inconsistently defined from discipline to discipline. Is empathy merely a matter of perspective-taking, imagining how the other feels in X circumstance? Or does empathy imply a synchronization between empathizer and empathizee (terms I've made up just now)? Is empathy where you lose yourself in the other's feelings? Does empathy with someone mean you agree with or endorse them? Or is that sympathy? Which should medical professionals practice? Teachers? Officers of the law or courts? Does empathy lead to kindness? Does kindness require empathy as a prerequisite?

There's scads of debate about this across the disciplines and over the decades.

I'm skeptical about empathy. That is, I have a kneejerk distrust of any unqualified praise of empathy. That said, I have even more distrust for those who throw up their hands and decide to hell with it.

The Invisibilia episode caught my attention. I've listed to most of it. I have some issues with it.

It's a bit of a meta episode. Hannah Rosin, one of the hosts, introduces Lina Misitzis, a producer who's essentially trying out for a position at Invisibilia. Rosin gives Misitzis an interview she had with one Jack Peterson. Misitzis was to turn this interview into an Invisibilia piece. She decides to go a different direction.

Before we hear her direction, though, Rosen has us listen to her initial version of things.

Peterson is a former incel, a disaffected young man who for a while decided that his perceived difficulties with women were due to (1) his own unattractiveness and lack of virility; and (2) the fact that women ("femoids" as his fellow incels referred to women) were irrational, evil beings dedicated to harming men, mainly by refusing to have sex with them.

In the original Rosen interview (I should say, the edit of the interview as Rosin imagined it), Jack retells his own history with an unnamed woman (M) with whom he had a long on-again/off-again affair through his teens. This affair seems, as Jack tells it, well-salted with a lot of unhealthy and flat-out abusive dynamics, including Jack hacking into M's accounts and sending nude pictures of her to her college, boss, and family. He'd call and cry and say if she leaves him he'll commit suicide.

After yet another long-distance altercation in which M said she didn't want to see him again, Jack flies to her location and begs her to take him back. In his account, she has him strip down to his undies (to make sure he isn't armed) and then proceeds to strangle him. A half-naked Jack escapes, bangs on a window for help. Someone calls the police. When the police arrive, Jack asserts that he's suicidal to "protect" M from being arrested. This apparently starts his journey into (or is it out of?) incel-dom. After a few of the mass shooting incidents where incel-identifying men slaughtered people, he began to step away from the movement, eventually becoming a sort of spokesperson for former incels. He is 25 now.

Then we hear the version Misitzis produces.

Alarmed by what she sees as Rosen's credulity in trying to get into Jack's head, Misitzis presents a different version of the story, one that casts Jack's actions in a much different light. Specifically, she reviews Jack;s tale through the lens of women she knows (the many, many women she knows) who have suffered at the hands of stalkers and abusers. Her version is pretty stark: Jack, who has a history of abusing M, refuses to take no for an answer and flies to her location uninvited. She is apparently alarmed enough to ask him to strip to his undies to make sure he's not armed and planning to hurt her. This is, Misitzis offers, classic abuser behavior.

Misitzis underlines this point by re-cutting Jack's recorded account--but interspersing it with accounts of a woman (not M) who describes her abuser's actions. Thus we get a back-and-forth dynamic instead of a monologue: Jacks says I flew to her. The woman says One day he shows up out of the blue at my house, begging to talk to me.

Why, Misitzis asks, must we really feel empathy for Jack, who seems even now to have narrated himself into the position of victim in this story (he even goes so far to suggest that he's suffered much more than M ever has)? Why is it his side of the story we hear, his I-really-learned-from-this transformation that gets the limelight? This is, Misitzis suggests, a typical (and typically Invisibilia) peon to empathy, one that in her view demonstrates why empathy is such a problem concept.

By this point in the podcast, I'm mostly around the lake. I have a whole lot of feelings about what's happened so far--not just with Jack but with the producers.

More tomorrow.

Heroes of the Fourth Turning

Yesterday I read Will Arbery's new play (currently at Playwrights Horizons in NYC), Heroes of the Fourth Turning. Rod Dreher at The American Conservative blogged about it a few times, giving it high praise for its empathetic portrayal of white Catholic conservatives.

Empathetic is a loaded descriptor here, for reasons I'll get to in a moment.

The play, set in 2017 Wyoming (just before the total solar eclipse, just after Charlottesville), features the troubled, mostly twenty-something alumni of Transfiguration College (a real place where the playwright's parents work and where he lives). We see a few hours from the ending of a party celebrating the inauguration of the College's new president, beloved president Gina, who doesn't appear until the final scenes.

The other characters represent representative cross-sections of white conservatism. Teresa, aptly described by Dreher as an "Ann Coulter type," is in many ways the standout, Gina's former star pupil now blogging merrily as an intellectual powerhouse of the Right. She adores Steve Bannon, argues that Trump represents the next, necessary face for conservatives. Kevin is lost soul, desperately lonely, desperately horny, pathetically self-aware of how pathetic he is. He's a bit of an incel, though he never uses that term. Emily, Gina's daughter, is a deep-feeling soul questioning some of the harsher sides of modern-day conservatism. Justin is the oldest of the alumi at 38; he entered college after a stint in the Marines. His perspective aligns with Dreher's own Benedict Option (which gets name-checked here, as do a range of other theological and political works). A war is coming, he's convinced. The best Christians can do is batten down the hatches until it passes.

Most characters are convinced that some kind of conflict is happening. Teresa is eager for it. She wants warriors and castigates Kevin as a "soy boy," too weak-willed to stand for anything. Emily recoils at the thought of making war. So too does Gina, once she comes. She and Teresa have at it, former star pupil versus former favored professor.

Arbery gives every character some grand monologues. As Dreher notes, Teresa in particular sings well the tune of Sohrab Ahmari (from the recent Ahmari-French debates). Reacting to Gina's castigating Trump and his ilk as no true conservatives, Teresa lashes back:

Not being measured. Not being polite. I don’t want to be polite anymore. We can’t lie to ourselves. We’re past that. We’re in Crisis. They’re coming for our tabernacle. They want to burn it down. They want to destroy the legacy of heroes like you. So I propose leveling up. I propose looking at the truth in the face. Knowing what it looks like. Knowing what we look like to them. It’s not going anywhere. I propose not taking any shit. Not ignoring all the hypocritical bullshit. Going blow for blow. And being ready for the war, if it happens. When it happens. You call us racist, we’ll call you racist. You call us white, we’ll call you black. You call us Nazis, we’ll call you abortionists and eugenicists. You call us ignorant Christians, we’ll call you spineless hedonistic soulless bloviating bloodbags. But you stop doing that, and give this thing space and time to work itself out, we’ll stop too. You focus your efforts on making this a better nation, an American nation, a republic of ideas, we will too.

Challenged by Emily about the Christian precepts of love and empathy, Teresa slaps her down:

Oh don’t with the empathy. Liberals are empathy addicts. Empathy empathy empathy. Empathy is empty. Hannah Arendt says we don’t need to feel what someone else is feeling – first of all that’s impossible, second of all it’s self-righteous and breeds complacency, third of all it’s politically irresponsible. Empathize with someone and suddenly you’re erasing the boundaries of your own conscience, suddenly you’re living under the tyranny of their desires. We need to know how to think how they’re thinking. From a distance.

Gina's response is devastating, at least in my own star-pupil-who-loves-getting-accolades-from-professors eyes. She essentially declares that the school's great works curriculum has failed with Teresa, who's twisted it into a Machiavellian warfare strategy. Teresa's character spouts a viewpoint I find dangerous and repulsive, but the moment where Gina practically disowns her just stings.

I'm fascinated how and why this play has caught the fancy of New Yorkers. I tend to distrust it when NYC seizes upon a play as a "real" or "respectful" portrayal of a non-left/progressive demographic. Generally, when I scratch the surface of such accolades I find the same old "aren't they awful/fascinating/scary" stereotyping and "aren't we so much better" back-patting. I imagine the play would be very different, and very differently received, were it about white evangelicals. (Of course, I must admit that the characters' conversations would probably be a bit less erudite; Catholic higher ed institutions score better at intellectual rigor and cultural literacy on average.)

Part of the interest, however, seems to be that reaction against empathy. The dramaturg's intro to the printed edition of the play (and kudos to Playwrights Horizons for making such editions available immediately) cites a recent Invisibilia episode, "The End of Empathy," which I listened to while running today.

Both it and the play require me to chew on them a bit more.