Post #154: Tact and Truth

30 Oct. 2024

“A wise man’s heart knows the right time and the right way.”

—Ecclesiastes 8:5

     Is it not an exceedingly tricky and intricate business, this ever-shifting balance we must all strike between keeping the peace and saying our bit? “Say nothing that could give offense” marks a very dangerous cultural turn, it seems to me: conflict-avoidance of a kind that is bound to produce passive aggression (a specialty in overly “nice” Canada) and that encourages a pernicious degree of over-sensitivity and readiness to take offense at anything that is uncomfortable, awkward, or disagreeable—however right, necessary, or even salutary it may also be.

     On the other hand, to say whatever you wish, any time you like (perhaps so long as it’s sincere) and never to mind the injuries along the way, cannot be right either. To know just how hard to hit and how much to hold back, and where to find exactly the right measure of tact and skillful means that every situation calls for anew, wow, that is a very difficult exercise indeed! No wonder I’m still struggling with it after fifty years.

     I was reminded of this difficulty when I recently wrote a text in German for the first time in over thirty years (I mean with a view to making it public)—about the Austrian Demosthenes I mentioned in my note to #151, Herbert Kickl—a prime example of the axe-in-the-forest mode (quite funny, but equally merciless) for which German-speaking types of a certain polemical bent have long acquired a well-justified notoriety in the world. (If you are looking for a veritable chainsaw, read Schopenhauer.) The piece was surprisingly well received and appeared last week in Die Weltwoche, a Swiss journal known for being welcoming to argument, or even a little disputatious. The process of writing formally in German again after such a long time, and the encouragement I received from the editor to produce more, stirred things up for me considerably, and led to some reflections along the lines I have outlined in #105 about the discomforts of being born German, only even more intensely in the German version.

     Thus the question became quite urgent how much irritation I am willing to court back “at home” when it isn’t really home anymore. How far does the need and right to express myself freely count for, and how much countervailing  consideration do I owe to my friends, my family, and perhaps even my unloved compatriots at large? How much courage am I able to muster these late days (or so I feel) towards making myself unpopular if necessary (#110), and would the expected price be worth paying? We cannot fight all the battles that present themselves in life, so which are worth getting into, in what manner, and towards what ends? That one should never dip one’s blade in poison, I have stressed before (#151) and that was also the crux of my missive to Vienna. But what counts as poison, exactly? What offense given is gratuitous, and what necessary, in a world where none of us can be sure of possessing the truth, even assuming that we continue to believe in its existence, which is not a given, these days especially (#147)?

     I was much agitated by these questions as I struggled with my second text, on why I would not call myself a patriot, especially in a German context, and I kept revising it again and again, trying to arrive at the right balance. But when I thought I had done a reasonable job and I sent it in at last, breathing a sigh of relief, I was soon overcome by such violent second thoughts that I felt I had to retract the text or risk damnation of a kind that would not have been worth it. I slept on it and woke up with an idea on my mind for how the thing could perhaps be recast and set right after all—at least sufficiently right to justify the attendant risks. This had to be explained to the editor, of course, who may by now be tired of my complicated ways, or who may not like the piece in the first place. We shall see.

     The bigger issue is that I have not been able to resolve my question, either in German or in English. Where is the line? How much conflict to tolerate or even seek out, and for what purposes? How much sharp reasoning and wording to apply, and how much gentleness and forbearance? Where to find all the subtle skillful means that are so hard to come by in life (#44, #72)?

     We imagine “good” Buddhists in particular to be unfailingly soft-spoken, and one could quote plenty of Pali Scripture to that effect; but I wonder. U Ba Khin was by all accounts a great Vipassana teacher; nonetheless, Goenkaji, his devoted student, describes (in his Day 8 Discourse) how he made the walls of his meditation center in Rangoon tremble with the vehemence of one of his disciplinarian outbursts, and that was not an isolated incident, but a well-established part of his reputation.

     Or turn to Jesus and the scenes he made with the moneylenders at the temple (Matthew 21:12-13), and the extraordinary invective he launched (in chapter 23, most notably) at the “whited sepulchers”—“ye serpents, ye vipers”—that is, the Jewish religious authorities of the day.  Son of God or not, he was nothing if not combative when it came to the crescendo of his preaching, nor much inclined to mince his words. “I have not come to bring peace but a sword” (Matt. 10:34) should not be taken too literally; the same voice preached that we are to turn the other cheek, after all, and told the companion who drew a sword to protect him from arrest and death, to put it away, since those who live by violence shall perish by it too (Matt. 26:51-52). Yet his words were nevertheless about as sharp and cutting as can be imagined. (Osho points out, in one of his more sensible interpretations, that while the Buddha grew up among the refinements of a provincial palace, surrounded by dancing girls, Jesus did his growing up on construction sites alongside his carpenter father.)* What to make of all this? For someone who is neither a Jesus nor a Buddha, nor an U Ba Khin or a Goenka, but only an ordinary worldling, what gives?

     Nor is that all, but behind these scenes an even trickier question of balance rears its menacing head. In making such fraught determinations, how much of our trust are we to put in the heart, in feelings that are so prone to overshooting, yet contain their own invaluable wisdom—and how much are we to rely on the head instead, which may seem cooler and calmer, but which is so often overly narrow and sometimes dangerously blind in its own way? For my part, I can only be at ease with my decisions when these dimensions can be kept more or less in line with each other; when the head and the heart tell me altogether different things, however, I do not know what to do, because both speak to me with their own unanswerable authority. All I can hope for is that further reflection, or silent meditation, will somehow resolve the dissonance one way or another and get me to a more harmonious message eventually.

*Martin Luther comes to mind, a miner’s son writing to a pope (Open Letter to Leo X) almost exactly 500 years ago: “Nowadays our ears have been made so soft and sensitive by the raving crowd of flatterers that we cry out as if we had been bit by a rabid dog as soon as we meet with the slightest disapproval. When we cannot ward off the truth with any other pretext, we flee from it by ascribing it to the fiction of a fierce temper, impatience, and immodesty. But what good is salt if it does not sting, what use the edge of a sword if it does not cut?” (See also my #23.) Yet who can be altogether comfortable with this pronouncement in view of the horrible religious wars to which it gave rise, at least if one would hesitate to assign the blame for such things only to one side?