11:00am | Why do you think the Westboro Baptist Church is wrong?
It’s a question most people wouldn’t bother to ask themselves simply because they see the WBC as being wacko/repugnant/etc. But the subject of the sentence is “you,” not the WBC; and the broader question is about how all of us come to be the people we are.
Once you put aside the soul (which is an ultimately unanswerable hypothetical—or “a leap of faith,” if you like the sound of that better) and genetics, you’re left with acculturation, the aspect of self from which we can draw the most direct and demonstrable connecting line to beliefs.
And when it comes to acculturation, we and the WBC are all in the same boat; we are all shaped by the same basic factors. Parents, books, society, the gods, common sense—there’s basically nothing you had access to that they didn’t. You can say all you like that you had better parents, read better books (or understood the same books better), that you have more properly received this or that divine spirit, etc.—but they can say the same thing right back at you.
If I were to ask everyone who came out to protest the WBC why they feel that the WBC’s belief system is wrong/bad, most all of the answers would fall somewhere within three categories: (1) it’s just obvious/self-evident/common sense, (2) the WBC is out of touch with Truth (whether some god’s or otherwise), and/or (3) most of society disagrees with them1.
But both (1) and (2) ultimately come down to feeling something really, really strongly—never a convincing argument when that strength of feeling is for something counter to what you believe—while (3) doesn’t fly, since we all agree that at times society has shown itself to be capable of the greatest wrongs.
In his “The Adventures of the Soul”, Anatole France writes something that impresses me very much:
There is no such thing as objective criticism any more than there is objective art, and all who flatter themselves that they put aught but themselves into their work are dupes of the most fallacious illusion. The truth is that one never gets out of oneself. [. . .] We are locked into our persons as into a lasting prison. The best we can do, it seems to me, is gracefully to recognize this terrible situation and to admit that we speak of ourselves every time that we have not the strength to be silent.
To be quite frank, the critic ought to say: “Gentlemen, I am going to talk about myself on the subject of Shakespeare, or Racine, or Pascal, or Goethe—subjects that offer me a beautiful opportunity.”
To delimit what France is saying here to criticism—literary or otherwise—is to miss the point. Because, really, can we ever get clear of our feelings, beliefs, desires, perceptions, etc., so that we’re somehow talking not about them but about Reality or Truth?
I don’t see how we could. Personally, I don’t pretend (in the name of ‘journalistic objectivity’ or anything else) that I am not locked into this completely subjective state of affairs. I am that completely subjective state of affairs. That’s why often I go out of my way to write in the first-person: This is not What Is, just how things feel/appear from here.
And is there any feeling or apperception about which we cannot be mistaken? Can we ever be so smart or enlightened, or can something be so self-evident, that we cannot be in error? Well, consider the case of Thomas Jefferson.
On the whole Jefferson was, I think most of us would agree, a very intelligent, very forward-thinking, very well-intended person. A great man. And yet, like all of us, he was very much formed by his experience. So not only did he own slaves, but even living in close proximity to these people did not preclude him from forming some beliefs about them that seem to us almost impossibly ignorant and repugnant. For example, in his Notes on the State of Virginia (written c. 1781-1783), he writes the following:
In general, their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection. [. . .] Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me, that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid; and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous. [. . .] Their love is ardent, but it kindles the senses only, not the imagination. [. . .] The improvement of the blacks in body and mind, in the first instance of their mixture with the whites, has been observed by every one, and proves that their inferiority is not the effect merely of their condition of life. . . .2
If he (Thomas Jefferson) could be wrong about that (whether people more recently from Africa are capable of thinking and feeling as deeply as people less recently from Africa and more recently from Europe)—and he seems pretty damn wrong to me—that leads to questions like, How is it that Jefferson could be so wrong? and Is there any reason to believe that I have some capacity for not-being-wrong that Jefferson lacked? and if not, what wrong beliefs might it be possible for me to hold?
Is there some method for believing or perceiving that is not subject to our subjectivity? Can we, as individuals and as a community, do something in the way of acquiring beliefs that Thomas Jefferson (if we think he was wrong about Africans) and the United States (if we think we were wrong to take slaves, to commit genocide, to torture) have proven unable to do?
My answer is “no,” but here most people say otherwise by pointing to some sort of Force—God, the Universe, Inherent Wisdom, etc.—that will guide us (in really important matters, at least), if only we open ourselves up to it properly. But almost inevitably we judge how properly opened others are not by (what they sincerely believe to be) their experience of the Force, but by their beliefs/actions after the fact—specifically, whether we agree with those beliefs/actions. If we don’t accord with them, we feel sure that they went astray somewhere along the way.
But feeling sure (or that something seems obvious, etc.) isn’t much of a test of Rightness. No doubt the WBC* feel really sure that they’re right. They have conviction. I’m sure they would admit to some degree of subjectivity and acculturation—after all, they’re only human—but they would point to being in touch with God, Right, Truth. They’re certain. Does their certainty have anything at all to do with whether they’re right? It doesn’t seem so to me.
But neither, then, does your certainty that the WBC are wrong or crazy or immoral have anything to do with whether you’re right. I see no reason to believe anyone’s certainty ought to mean anything to others. Insert “the counter-protestors” or “almost everyone I know” or “Greggory Moore” where I just wrote “the WBC*,” and certainty still seems equally far from being even evidence of anything (except of feeling), let alone proof. Certainty is a description of an emotional/intellectual state, not an accurate assessment of a state of knowledge—and as such it’s not productive in terms of considering, learning, ascertaining if we are in error. It may feel comfortable, but that very comfort seems like a seduction, a reason to be skeptical of it, to remain on our toes.
So here we are, alone in our subjective shame or glory, feeling A-B-C, believing D-E- F, wanting G-H-I, none of us having a more verifiably unobscured view of Truth (if there is such a thing) than any other. Were we all to acknowledge this state of affairs, to admit that we may not speak for God or the Universe or Rightness but only for our subjective selves, we would avoid unproductive talk about who is in touch with Truth and redistribute that energy to debates about whether a given belief or action is useful for shaping our community so that we’re increasingly happy to live in it.
Here, finally, we have come to the ground on which my opposition to the WBC is built: I find completely unconvincing their suggestion that we will create a better society if we (e.g.) stop “enabling” homosexuality and thus save ourselves from God’s wrath. In fact, I find it ludicrous; and as far as I can tell, their vision of a better society doesn’t much resemble mine.
And the thing is, while the WBC would claim they’re right to do this, even they would admit that doing so does nothing improve society. “You mean do we think [people who don’t share the WBC’s belief system] will obey?” replied Shirley Phelps-Roper as I questioned her about what the WBC hope to achieve by their demonstrations. “No, of course not! Are you kidding me?”
No doubt the WBC would find no less ludicrous my belief that one way we can have a better society is to stop being at all concerned with other people’s bedroom preferences, let alone so concerned that we want to withhold from some of our brothers and sisters certain rights that the rest of us enjoy—let alone so angry about it that we go on mini-tours holding signs stating that God hates whatevs.
Although I feel pretty damn right about this, I am always open, because feeling right is just a feeling, and I am fallible and could have been misacculturated. In any case, I’m not looking to be right, but to contribute to improving society. And I don’t see how talking about how right I am could make such a contribution.
Clearly, when those with whom we disagree are closed and claim infallibility and certainty in the impossibility of their misacculturation, we see their intractability as an impediment to bettering society. None of us should allow the possibility of ourselves being such an impediment. Because what’s bad for the goose is bad for the gander.
Footnotes
1Regarding this last one, we’ll let it go that if even here in Long Beach 47.55% of voters went for “Yes” on Proposition 8, exactly how much the majority people disagree with the WBC is somewhat of an open question.
2This example—and much of my general thinking on the topic of this essay—comes to me by way of Richard Rorty.