Post #113: Minding Our Worst Moments

25 May 2024

“Everyone is more than the worst thing you have ever done.”

—Bryan Stevenson, The Dhamma Brothers (2008)

     We live in times that make it easier than ever, especially via videos without context, to reduce someone to his or her worst moments (more usually his, an important point I shall return to) and not only broadcast it across the globe but leave a tarnishing or discrediting mark on his character forever. If only the wisdom needed for dealing with the fallout were developing as rapidly and profusely as our ability to spread the word about every misdeed under the sun at the speed of light to every corner of the planet…

     The melancholy fact that it is possible, indeed easy, to ruin one’s life by a single sufficiently foolish or inattentive action is nothing new. One match can light up a house and burn to the ground in minutes something that may have taken years and decades, even centuries, to build and furnish. (I do not find the so-called Darwin Awards amusing or appropriate, but they are a rich source of inspiration in this particular regard, if none other.) Merely look the wrong way before crossing the street and a moment’s lapse can end it all for you. If it happened to Churchill during a visit to New York (he looked right and got hit by a car) and to me in London (I looked left and escaped a red bus so narrowly that I could feel the rush of the wind) then it could probably happen to you too. And not only that, but even a single truly devastating word (some of us do have a deadly talent for discovering it, alas) has been known to end friendships, break up families, incite murder, and start wars.

     What is new, then, is not the terrible destructiveness of bad moments, but the vast multiplication of the possibilities. These days, with an instant camera in nearly every hand, all it takes to wreak havoc on your life, with a little bad luck mixed in as a catalyst, is losing your temper for a minute in the wrong setting; or making a sufficiently unguarded and ill-considered comment before unsympathetic witnesses or self-appointed grand inquisitors (and their ranks too seem to have swelled alarmingly in recent years); or firing off an injudicious message that takes a minute to compose and a fraction of a second to dispatch, irrecoverably, into the ether, where it will be preserved for all time. Worst of all, you might get caught in the act of a clumsy and unwelcome sexual advance. Some may delight in a brave new world where no offense is too trifling and no offender too obscure to be mercilessly pilloried. Such frolickers feast on the ill deeds of others, as zealots invariably do, in the treacherous certainty that they could never find themselves on the wrong side of the fence. When their bad moment comes, they shall doubly deserve their rude awakening.

     (At this point a good friend chimes in to tell me how much he likes the preceding three paragraphs: so much that he would have me get rid of the rest altogether—well over eighty percent of my text as it stands! To this I can only answer, feeling somewhat sheepish, that cuts are an important part of the writer’s art, no doubt, and that the 80-20 rule has its uses. But concision and  efficiency are not everything. The more traditional modes of slow cultivation, which still have a tenuous hold on scholars, meditators, and writers, are built upon the conviction, or perhaps the pious hope, that the final twenty percent of the journey, though most arduous and costly, are also the most ultimately meaningful. Along 80-20 lines, on the other hand, one cannot attain to the beginnings, even, of wisdom or mastery, which may seem not worth the trouble to an age in a rush, but which have their own inestimable rewards. By dispensing with any aspiration to plumb the depths, or reach the heights, one risks dooming one’s life not only to superficially, which is bad enough, but to triviality, which is intolerable. As for sacrificing your darlings, whether in the spirit of Moriah, or Aulis, or Oxford, Mississippi, such harsh methods don’t much appeal to me—especially when I am making the case for milder means than what we are tempted by under the influence of our most rigorous and righteous enthusiasms.)

     Let me start my argument on the most unfavorable ground, with the very worst offenses. Many heinous crimes, too, are not the fruits of premeditated design, but committed in the heat of the moment. It does not take long to reach for a gun and pull the trigger. Knifing someone to death is a more gruesome and protracted business, and a certain Grady Bankhead describes such a scene in “The Dhamma Brothers”—an act of savagery in the context of robbing a trailer, which Bankhead did not commit himself, but for which he was nonetheless held fully responsible and sentenced to death in Alabama, because he was out with the perpetrators and did not interfere.*

     Please don’t get me wrong: I quite agree that the enabling accomplice’s part must be deterred as surely as the perpetrator’s, and that it would be as morally insane to excuse the one as the other. Bankhead himself would say as much. But the question is whether even such a horrendously bad moment should be used to define someone for the rest of  his life, to the exclusion of all else. I challenge anyone with a heart not a stone in his breast to watch “The Dhamma Brothers” (it’s less than an hour long and available online) and tell me, afterwards, that there is nothing more to any of the men in question than their very worst moments. Again, my point is not to wish these moments away after the fact, or to say that we can do without punishing them very severely in many cases, but only to insist that they alone cannot tell the true story of a life, and should not be allowed to stand in for it.

     Turning a blind eye to anything more redeeming in the guilty characters, as is so often done by the punitively-minded, I take to be no indication of a particularly fine sensitivity to justice at all, but rather of a misplaced confidence that one would never, under any circumstances, do any such hideous thing. It may be so or it may not be, but one should, in any case, never be too sure of what one might be capable of when one’s stars align in the worst ways, and it has been said of many a sage or saint that he was perhaps a little too concerned about his dark potential.** Be that as it may, the ease with which many less than admirable personages shrug off their own capacity for serious wrongdoing looks to me (and has always done so since I began pondering the matter as a teenager) like no more than an easy way to feel superior, in much the same spirit as the explanation given for his dad’s racism by Gene Hackman’s character (Agent Anderson) in Mississippi Burning: “If you ain't better than a criminal, son, who are you better than?”***

     “Soft on crime, soft on crime!” the shouts will likely ring in response. Well no, I am not soft on the crime, which is what it is, and often inexcusable enough; what I am objecting to is the reduction of the guilty human being to a criminal and nothing more, ever again. The call to loving not only your neighbor as yourself, but even those who hate and persecute you, gets conveniently forgotten in such situations, as if loving the man and hating the sin no longer applied when the archaic butcher’s standard of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, can be brought out. Love as I understand it never calls for such retributions in kind; that is precisely not what was meant by turning the other cheek, or forgiving not just seven times but seventy times seven.

     I bring up the universal loving-kindness (I mean agape/caritas, not eros, obviously) that was so prominent a feature of a certain Nazareth teacher’s relations with the wretches of his age, because hardheartedness so often robes itself in religious righteousness, alas. (Would that it were a problem for one spiritual tradition only, and that others could easily be exempted; but I fear none of them can.) The teacher in question was friendly with centurions in the very occupying army that put him to death, and he asked forgiveness for his legionary torturers (for they know not what they are doing). He also befriended prostitutes and the rightly despised tax-farmers who held contracts authorizing them to squeeze what they could out of destitute populations with no regard for justice or mercy whatever. The bandits alongside whom Jesus passed from this life were merely the last in a long line of such hardened men among his acquaintances. (All of which is speaking of the man only; about the Son of God it is not my place to hold opinions.)

     Among the most celebrated saints in the Christian pantheon, we find a certain Saul of Tarsus (a.k.a. Paul the Apostle or Saint Paul), a notorious hunter of the faithful who, when he had his conversion experience, found himself on the road to Damascus only because he had run out of hated sectarians to put in chains, and worse, in Jerusalem. Angulimala, in the Buddhist context, was a serial murderer so profligate in his killings that he wore the fingers of his victims in garlands around his neck, and he collected many such necklaces. Yet he too became a great saint, said to have attained fully liberation after he turned his life around upon an encounter with the Buddha.

     Such are the extreme cases—perhaps too extreme to be found very relevant to pettier and more everyday offenses. Very well, let us say a man loses his temper, raises his voice, or even his hand, heaven forbid, against a member of the fair sex. The moment of weakness may cost him the better part of his life. Even if he escapes being put behind bars (and some common sense prevails in most juries, which are not unanimously eager to wreck lives if it can be avoided), before the bar of judgment in a voyeuristic world ready to believe the worst of others (and of men especially), he may find himself reduced to an abuser, a batterer, a beast, ever after. Is that right and just and wise?

     Is someone an irrecoverably bad man because he lost control for a minute? And is it not a little too convenient for the female side, whose unkindest cuts so often make up in subtlety what they lack in brute force? “Have you no shame!” I expect the indignant avengers to cry and thunder at me, when so many women have been horribly injured, maimed, even killed by out-of-control men. How can you want to make excuses for them! I have shame enough, I can assure you; I can cry with the best of them over such horrors; and I am not making excuses. You will not hear a peep from me justifying assault and murder; but these are terrible crimes that show up only too clearly on our collective radars today, as they should. It is the complicating factors, which are always lurking in the shadows to upset our tidy moral equations, that are in danger of being overlooked.

     If male bad moments predominate so very egregiously in our contemporary calculus, this is, no doubt, in part a reflection of the statistical fact that male distributions, in practically everything, tend considerably more towards the tail ends, in both directions, than the female. It is men who are most often shockingly under-socialized, or emotionally backward, or disposed to be temperamentally disagreeable in any number of ways. If there are, without the most aggressive social engineering, more of them in boardrooms, there have always been many more of them in prisons as well, among suicides, in dangerous professions that do everyone’s dirty work. Not all men are cranks; but almost all aggravated cranks are men. As are most heroes, saints, and geniuses. It is not just self-serving myth-peddling to identify the extremes more with the male than the female. Perhaps a sex endowed with the wondrous power of giving birth, whether having children is considered desirable or not, has no reason to turn so readily to outlandish ways of life. Perhaps it is the hypergamic instincts of the female putting pressure on the male. Whatever the reason, it is a deeply-rooted reality to be reckoned with, not just an inconvenience to be educated away.****

     Bad behavior has acquired so predominantly male a countenance in part because we have chosen to redefine what constitutes tolerable conduct in a way that makes many characteristic male behavioral patterns look socially unacceptable. Societies have become continually more civilized, one may say, and along the way more domesticated, not to say more feminized. The rougher masculine virtues, though still of existential importance at the margin, no longer fit into the big picture as comfortably as they once did. The more societies advance, the more they will lean on our wilder instincts, certainly the violence, and likely much rough play along with it—Freud was right about that and discussed it with great astuteness in his Civilization and Its Discontents.

     The venerable Viennese, a gentleman if ever there was one, would not bring back the law of the jungle, far from it—and neither would I (see #69, #88, #108, etc.). But he saw the cost we must pay for our advances, or rather, that some of us will have to pay, namely the more unruly elements, among which men will always be very disproportionately numbered. To put it bluntly, the price of moving towards zero-tolerance models will be borne almost exclusively by boys and men who have bad moments. Girls and women have their bad moments too, of course; but they know to hide them better. Some of the lapses in question may indeed be terrible ones, inexcusable in anyone, and indicative of deep character flaws that cannot but call for a severe response; others, much less so. I am not arguing against striking a judicious balance, but insisting, to the contrary, on the imperative importance (and great difficulty) of doing so in a way that does not end up looking equitable mostly because it tacitly presupposes one side’s standards much more than the other’s.

     Yes, by all means, we must keep women (and men too) safe from menacing sexual advances. That is all very well so far as outright harassment is concerned—but only in the traditional dictionary sense, please, not the obfuscating neologisms of the past forty years. Alas, we have long left behind such antiquated demarcations, and what counts as threatening has been hopelessly muddled with what is merely unwanted and unwelcome. Once again, the dynamic is increasingly lopsided: women may invite attention with whatever promiscuity they wish, even force it upon the onlooker’s eye; but all responsibility for awkward situations, or more serious derailments, goes by definition to the other side, often with little regard for proportionality. That men need to be taught manners in their dealings with women, our grandmothers understood not only as well as we do, but better. But they also knew, as we apparently no longer do, that a slap on the wrist and a sharp word are usually quite sufficient for dealing with a clumsy, clueless, rude, or otherwise obnoxious gentleman manqué.

     It is unavoidable that the net we have designed would enmesh men almost exclusively; women do not often make such overt sexual advances, or when they do, at least they are rarely so inept as those made by the offending lads. Very well, some form of penalty must surely be meted out for messing up one’s moves. There is no way to relieve the mammalian male of this burden in the procreative contest, though it is a lot harder to bear for ordinary guys than many women seem to realize, perhaps because they are known to show little interest in the average man. Still it might cross our minds occasionally, as we busy ourselves with cutting-edge micro-cleanup missions, that the human species has been peopled since time immemorial not by the smooth and polished Casanovas of the world, but by just the kinds of pushy and pathetic male advances that we are on the verge of criminalizing altogether. Had the women of the past been quite such lily-livered wall-flowers as our rules of engagement increasingly suppose, we would never have made it this far, any of us.

     It is notorious among women that the male of the species does not, as a rule, know his part very well. Confusion is rife, nerves are raw, the stakes high, resentments of missteps rampant; and so the entire moral risk of encounters gone wrong gets conveniently unloaded on the male side these days. Not a very enticing prospect to face, as a young and callow chap especially. Can it be any surprise to us, then, to discover how relatively squeamish so many Gen-Zetters are about sex—how generally intimidated by it, in other words, especially among the mass of unremarkable boys, on whom the whole delicate and touchy business has always been hardest (#111)? The human mating game cannot but turn on taking a chance; that is simply a matter of ground rules. Only who would wishes to stick his neck out when he is not sure of what he is doing, and when what he has in front of him is in effect a revolver of the Russian roulette design, which he must aim at his temple when making his move…

     Of the risks in the bedroom proper, I durst not speak more than a few hushed words. Suffice it to say that the bulk of the moral and legal hazards seem, once again, to have been transferred to the male side. Here it must be added, in fairness, that they have always been very predominantly on the female side at the physical and reputational levels, with the emotional dimension a matter of continuing debate and dispute. In light of this signal asymmetry, our efforts at protecting women more assiduously are very understandable and hard to find fault with, but once again, the price of tightening the ratchet will be paid by plenty of merely hapless men, not only the bad ones—and even the momentarily bad not therefore always and invariably rotten.

     The righteous of the day may shout, they may goad, they may needle all they want, and they do. But lose your cool and take the bait, whether willingly or from weakness, and you can be sure that the video making the rounds afterwards will edit out anything that might make your lapse appear in a milder and more excusable light. Your accusers would be fools, in terms of their strategic interests (and do not imagine that they aren’t strategists), if they failed to clip all mitigations away; such are the weapons of choice in our blessed day, and no one in the blinding heat that surrounds passionate human disputes can be expected to hold back out of sheer fairmindedness or charitable sentiment. If such benevolent qualities were more to be counted on in human affairs, the whole problem would not arise, or if it did, in a far more benign and manageable form than what we have before us.

     It is not, I want to stress, that I have any ready formulae or decisive answers to offer, but only cautionary remarks to make. To wit, that provocations count for something, not only reactions, however undisputed the obligation to restrain ourselves, from violence above all else. Responsibility is a subtle thing that can certainly fall sometimes on one side alone; more commonly, however, it must be shared in ways that are complicated and vexatious. The dynamic between the sexes is more complex and subtle still, and cannot be properly understood, let alone set right, when we look only at what is most eye-catching. Power need not be formal to be real, abuse not physical to be serious. Is any of this ever easy or straightforward? Of course not; it is terribly tangled, so much so that a certain teacher of mankind urged his followers to avoid litigiousness above all, and take a loss before taking each other to court. It is not a model much in favor, but it should remind us, if nothing else, never to expect too much from the letter of the law. What we need, if we wish to rise above mere punishment to justice, is an unwavering sense of balance and of what is reasonable: a wise heart, in other words, which we numb and deaden when we reach for crude and mechanical standards that absolve us of the need to make our judgments case by case, and get them right.

     Bah humbug, a contemporary cynic might sneer (as opposed to the ancient type in the mold of Diogenes, who was made of more sagacious stuff), nothing but the contemptible special pleading of another troublesome human male—most likely a crank or a misfit, or better yet, a “mean white man” with a nasty temper (meanness and nastiness having become, apparently, the attributes of one race and sex only). He must have something to hide, or he would not see fit to bother us with his qualms! Very well, sneer away if you must. I have my share of lapses to answer for, no doubt; whether they are any graver, or perhaps more innocent, than those of others I do not know, nor would I wish to pronounce upon the matter if I did. I can only say to the righteous of the world, or those who take themselves to be, that they might want to keep in mind the complications of throwing the first stone, and give a bit more thought to the glass houses that they are probably sitting in, if they are not singular exceptions to the human rule.

     Perhaps there are indeed some among these enthusiastic accusers and vigilante enforcers who are much freer of blemishes and faults than I am, or than others are. I would congratulate them on their purity if that were really the case; they shall have their reward. I am not denouncing anyone in my turn, only suggesting that we should all look a little more to our own actions, a lot less to those of others—and what is more, peer much more deeply into the abysses of own hearts—before we rush in where angels fear to tread and issue our grand condemnations, lest we be judged ourselves, and found wanting. Even when, peering through colored glasses as we all must, our verdicts seem to be entirely in order, it would behoove us to restrain our vindictive urges. The most exemplary life can sometimes be tripped up in an instant, by a mere pebble, or a moment’s carelessness, and the day may come for any of us when we need others to be merciful. Kyrie eleison.

     (This one goes to Ariane and Morgan.)

*The sanguinary twists and turns of American criminal justice, if those be the right words to use, are not my concern here; but let me register in passing my protest at the practice of assigning, in the name of the law, the same level of capital guilt to accomplices as to instigators and primary perpetrators, as if anyone could know how a day’s events might unfold, or as if most of us, who are not heroes, had the wherewithal to step in between a boozed-up knife-wielder and his victim—often with the even more intolerable pseudo-judicial twist that the main culprit cops a plea and gets off with a lighter sentence than the accomplice who ends of going to the gallows in his stead.

**I heard Douglas Murray once say as much of Jordan Peterson (minus the imputation of saintliness) in conversation with Matt Dillahunty, if I remember correctly. The founder of my own school of Vipassana meditation, S.N. Goenka, recalled in an interview with the Indian Express (3 July 2010), not long before his death, that when he first began to explore the inner chambers of his mind, he found them to be full of “snakes, scorpions, and centipedes.” It would not be far off, I reckon, to say that a keen sense of their own sinful and wicked proclivities is probably one of the distinguishing marks of most great sinners and putative saints alike.

***The line in the film refers not to criminals but to blacks, and I will not replicate it in the original here, partly because my point has nothing to do with race and partly because we live in such inane times that the simple mention of a forbidden word (forbidden to some, that is, and reserved to others on account of the color of their skin, another shibboleth that I refuse to bow before) might draw the kind of foolish attention that I do not care in the least to attract. I object with all my heart to this state of affairs, and I deny categorically anyone’s right to tell me what words I may or may not use, especially in reference to historical materials, direct quotations, titles of older books and the like. But this is not the time or place for that fight, so let my insistence on the term “black” suffice for marking my determined opposition to an inquisitorial turn of mind that would, in addition to the prohibitions, force a quasi-adjective on me whose presuppositions and political dynamics I deplore and repudiate. I am not eager to rush into any fires, nor do I aspire to heroism or martyrdom in any other way; I merely insist on exercising freely my inalienable writer’s right to the language of his choice and training—a tradition in words that connects us to a hundred generations of writing human beings and that should make us feel very small by comparison, not only individually but also as a generation.

****Camille Paglia claims for herself the mantle of Tiresias, a blind prophet in Greek myth who was said, by way of punishment for disturbing a pair of copulating snakes, to have been turned from a man into a woman for seven years, then back again, to be later consulted by the gods on the respective degrees of pleasure enjoyed during sex by the male and the female of the human species. (I won’t be a spoiler and give away his answer. Look it up: it’s a good story.) Paglia’s position is a complicated one along so many parameters that this cannot be the place to unravel the many strands, but her perspective does have the singular advantage of combining a profound, and deeply sexual, appreciation for the feminine and masculine alike. Her reflections on “Sex and Violence, or Nature and Art” are raw beyond compare, and questionable in all kinds of directions, but what they accomplish like few other treatments of this unruly subject is to capture its messy complexities in a spirited defense against those who would sanitize it beyond recognition. (For the reference to Tiresias and a reprinted version of the chapter on sex and violence, see Free Women, Free Men (Canongate 2018), pp. xviii-xix, 3–37.)