I have been having a hard time with the isolation of the pandemic. I am all too keenly aware of how fortunate I am to have a home, to have a job, to have a paycheck. My job brings me into contact with many people who do not have homes, jobs, or paychecks. The regime is currently attempting to sacrifice them in the name of the economy.
I was recently in the shower when I began wondering about why I am writing and reading and thinking about the things I am. The single word I am most interested in right now is 'coercion'. Other relevant words: violence, conformity, compulsion, roles, belonging, attribution (thanks, Laing), compliance.
To be a political animal is to be subject to psychical and physical 'pressures' that 'shape' us into certain ways of being. Freud is right to emphasize intrapsychic conflict. We are rife with it.
Why am I so preoccupied with violence? I studied military history as an undergraduate. I sought out work in forensic mental health. I have been feverishly reading political philosophy for more than 10 years.
'Why am I writing about these things in this way?' I thought to myself in the shower.
'It's about me', I said aloud to myself.
Then I cried really hard for a while. As I was crying I was flooded with memories of the first day of kindergarten. I remember the fear, the anxiety, the crying, the desire to hide behind Dad's legs.
The memory was viscerally rich and imagistically sparse: 'Don't make me go there. I don't want to go there'. I said this aloud and I understood. I felt it.
Of course the writing is about me. Of course I experienced coercive elements of school. Of course it hurt to be pushed into an institution, to be forced out of the home, because my parents had to go to work. Of course I cried and it hurt.
Of course my parents experienced this violence before me, and in their hurt I became hurt too.
Hurt people hurt people. And we are all hurting in one way or another.
And I am among the most privileged individuals in the world. A white man born in the United States in a period of profound prosperity. How is it that I have experienced this much social coercion? How is it that I have been shaped in such palpable ways? How is it that I can sob and sob and sob in the shower upon realizing that my preoccupation with coercion and violence is my attempt to come to terms with myself?
How?
How must the violence experienced by the less fortunate, the poor, people of color, women and queer folks, how must that violence affect them?
I have spent so much time in the last number of years reflecting on the process of skillful conformity, or how to navigate coercive situations (i.e. all human situations) in a way that preserves what it is that is worth preserving in me?
I am currently rereading The Narrative Life of Frederick Douglass with an eye to these questions. For the more I have read the most serious black authors of the last several hundred years (Davis, Baldwin, Douglass, Write), the more I see how much they understood, had to understand, the need for skillful conformity.
Skillful conformity is in some ways a process of dissimulation: of projecting a front, a cover, a surface, in order to obscure a depth, a soul. Douglass says that as a young man, still a slave, the slaves around him all competed to be able to work at 'The Great House Farm', the property where the big slave-owner lived. The work in the Great House Farm was preferable to the brutal work of the fields.
"The competitors for this office," Douglass writes, "sought as diligently to please their overseers, as the office-seekers in the political parties seek to please and deceive the people. The same traits of character might be seen in Colonel Lloyd's slaves, as are seen in the slaves of the political parties." A doubleness emerges.
Douglass claims that these slaves sang enthusiastically on their way to the Great House Farm. Their songs, he said, would be strange to those on the outside, for they "would sometimes sing the most pathetic sentiment in the most rapturous tone, and the most rapturous sentiment in the most pathetic tone." These songs, Douglass says, contained "words which to many would seem unmeaning jargon, but which, nevertheless, were full of meaning to themselves." He admits that he himself found them strange: "I did not, when a slave, understand the deep meaning of those rude and apparently incoherent songs.I was myself within the circle; so that I neither saw nor heard as those without might see and hear. They told a tale of woe which was then altogether beyond my feeble comprehension.... Every tone was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains."
Douglass further claims that many in the North mistakenly took the existence of slave songs "as evidence of their contentment and happiness." Nonsense, Douglass retorts. "It is impossible to conceive of a greater mistake. Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy. The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears." In this way, the songs, with their seeming interplay between surface and depth, content and form, exoteric and esoteric, were a way for slaves to resist "the soul-killing effects of slavery..."
Some sort of doubleness emerges from the experience of oppression, slavery, brutality, violence. I recoil at the idea that my experience could possibly ever be compared to what I read about in Douglass and others. I have cried every time I have read Douglass. There is no equating. But there is learning. And the extreme violence that Douglass experienced is pervasive at most levels of society. Only the super wealthy, or the divine, are free from these pressures. The super wealthy, I suspect, are slaves in a different sense: slaves to their greed; slaves to their distorted understanding of goodness; slaves to the idolatry of money.
Richard Write describes a comparable type of doubleness in his narrative preface to Uncle Tom's Children. He describes a process whereby white co-workers forced him into his role as 'lesser'. They accused Write of calling one of them 'Pease' as opposed to 'Mr. Pease'. Write was immediately caught in a double-bind. If he denied their claim he was in essence calling these men liars. If he assented to the claim he was agreeing that he had disrespected them. There was no way out. The only option was to assent to power.
Write tried to explain the incident to the people at home they admonished him: "they called me a fool. They told me that I must never again attempt to exceed my boundaries. When you are working for white folks, they said, you got to 'stay in your place' if you want to keep working." Write refers to this process of learning to 'play his role' as his 'Jim Crow Education'. Here I mean the phrase 'play his role' in a peculiar sense. Because Write did not simply cease learning; he continued to think, to try and read, to write. But in order to do so he had to conform, he had to shape himself to fit the images of his oppressors. "Here my Jim Crow education assumed quite a different form. It was no longer brutally cruel, but subtly cruel. Here I learned to lie, to steal, to dissemble. I learned to play that dual role which every Negro must play if he wants to eat and live." This was the price of his learning, his growth, his excess.
All of us necessarily exceed our roles. We are more than these truncated parts in society. The question is whether or not we are given leeway, wiggle room, space, to learn about what is more than our roles. Thus Write used his cunning to continue to learn, to exceed, in private, clandestinely. "Armed with a library card, I obtained books in the following manner: I would write a note to the librarian, saying: 'Please let this n***** boy have the following books." I would then sign it with the white man's name." Absolutely remarkable. Absolutely heart rending. I write with tearful eyes and tight lips.
I am so much freer than Douglass or Write ever was. This is my privilege.
Yet I experience violence. I experience coercion. I also must get up, go to work, and conform. But I thank God that I am afforded the excess. I do push against my role. And, unlike Write, I am not punched in the face and threatened with a steel bar. My fragile body and soul are not subjected in the same way; but I am subjected nonetheless; my subjectivity is crafted.
I need practices that allow me to preserve my excess from being devastated by the shaping power of institutions. I remember so viscerally sobbing as I was taken to kindergarten against my wishes. And I was cared for there! I was allowed to nap! I remember raising my hand for more tasty food that was served to me! It was so good for me. And yet I'm crying as I write this.
I am in want of practices that can preserve souls from the coercive effects of institutions and societies.
Doubleness, dissimulation, occupying the level of role and excess simultaneously, is the most imperative task if I am to continue to navigate this place, the world, America, Earth, history, whatever.
The most complex theoretical accounts of this phenomena are to be found in the tradition of esoteric writing initiated by Leo Strauss and deepened most significantly by Arthur Melzer; and the philosophy of the implicit as developed by Eugene Gendlin. I am currently working on combining these two views.
Gendlin, however, is wrong when he claims that the 'excess' or 'intricacy' is a discovery of our century. Douglass and Write understood the intricacy. All people who have hoped to be thoughtful in the company of others have understood the intricacy, or the need to conform if one is to think.
I am becoming more and more grounded in my desire to seek justice, to try to help, to try and do something in the face of all this.
There is a quotation I am trying to recall, but it escapes me. I paraphrase:
'If one wants to be free, one must fix as clearly as possible upon the ways in which one is enslaved.'
I am not enslaved. I am freer than most have ever been in the history of the world. But for my sake, and for the sake of clarifying the things I hope to work on, I am attempting to understand all of the forms of compulsion that rack my body, and the subtle cruelties that could make the first day of kindergarten an occasion worthy of tears.
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