Ad Hoc Rationalizations

Many moons ago when I was still wet behind the ears, I studied philosophy, including logic. I learned that there is a list of common logical fallacies that I should be on the lookout for. We all make errors in logic. Usually, these are honest mistakes. We’re just not thinking clearly, or we overlook things that are important. When these mistakes are pointed out to us, the decent thing to do is acknowledge the mistakes and reconsider our position. If we don’t change our position, we should formulate a better argument.

But there was something else I was taught to look out for, and this isn’t exactly a fallacy. It involves deception. I’m referring to arguments based on ad hoc rationalizations. Those who use ad hoc rationalizations aren’t telling you the truth about what’s motivating them. Maybe they think the actual reasons they hold a certain position won’t be persuasive, or maybe they think you will find the actual reasons repugnant, but whatever the cause, they’re not being straight with you. They are being intellectually dishonest.

Ad hoc rationalizations…that’s what sprang to mind when I was listening to the defense of Michigan’s ban on same-sex marriage presented to the Supreme Court yesterday. All of this mind numbing crap about how marriage isn’t a “dignity bestowing institution” or some such nonsense, and how straight couples will no longer connect to their kids or each other in the same way if same-sex couples are allowed to marry… These arguments sound strange and ring false because they’re smoke screens. They are ad hoc rationalizations for something that’s mean spirited and low. The real reason for the ban is animus, but you can’t say that the ban should stay in place because a lot of people in Michigan don’t like homos. That wouldn’t make a convincing legal argument in court, so they have to make something up that at least sounds rational.

As a gay man, it is infuriating to sit here and listen to someone who is normally thought of as an upstanding member of the community say, to the Supreme Court of the United States no less, that the reason the state should be allowed to discriminate against those like me is because if they didn’t, straight people may not love their babies as much anymore, that somehow treating those like me fairly would encourage a hedonistic, selfish attitude and that some might not take their family responsibilities as seriously as they do now. That bullshit stinks to high heaven. What kind of asshole would even say something like that?

The Ourtrageous Lie

Today, some of the justices voiced concern that if marriage equality becomes the law of the land, we will change an institution that has been around for a long time, and I find that disheartening. It used to be that people of different races were not allowed to marry. It used to be that arranged marriages were common. You married who your parents told you to marry, and the selection of your spouse had little to do with love. It used to be that wives and children were treated as the property of men. The institution of marriage has changed radically over the centuries. The idea that it is a solid tradition that has served humanity in its present form from the beginning of civilization until now is absurd. It saddens me that Supreme Court justices would sit on the bench, and in their official capacity, attempt to lend credence to this outrageous lie in order to justify their bigotry.

Be wary of those who claim to know all the answers.

Life is a mystery, and until we make peace with that mystery, we can feel haunted by it. Why are we here? Where are we going? What are we supposed to do? We’re like castaways who wake up on a desert island with amnesia. We long to make sense of it all, and we can latch onto almost any religion or philosophy if it gives us a sense of hope and meaning. Look at all the crazy things human beings are willing to believe just for a little peace of mind.

Some of us, the con artists among us, have learned how to play on our vulnerability. They claim to know all the answers. You may wonder why they are different. Why aren’t they just as clueless as we are?  Who gave them the authority to tell the rest of us the truth? The answer is we do when we choose believe them.

I think some of the con artists do it for the money. Many of them probably do it for the money. Some might do it for the adoration. Some could do it for the thrill of manipulating others. Maybe it gives them a sense of power. Some are probably conning themselves.

I don't think many of them are motivated by spirituality. I don't think spiritual people demand others to view them as authority figures.

A few words about A Boy’s Own Story

I’ve been reading Edmund White’s autobiographical novel A Boy’s Own Story.  This is my third reading. I first read the novel in the mid ‘80s soon after it was published. It was one of the first gay themed books I ever read, and it was a revelation. I read it again in the ‘90s along with the two sequels.

It is obvious that White loves words and prose. So much of the book is beautifully written. I want to read some sections over again aloud just to have the experience of having the words pour out of my mouth. But I think White goes overboard a bit at times. I think rather than serving the story, he sometimes got stuck on the aesthetic pleasure of describing certain details. If I were to write about a boy I crushed on in 8^th grade, and I compared the fluttering of his eyes to the lace curtains of a farmhouse caught by a spring breeze, the billowing sails of a boat and the flapping of a hummingbird’s wings, and then went on to compare his eyelashes to the hairs on a tarantula’s leg and the soft bristles of my grandmother’s Fuller hairbrush, I think at some point my readers might want to choke the life out of me. But White’s descriptions are much lovelier than mine, and I am quite envious of his abilities even though I think he does go on longer than he needs to quite often.

White has a way of describing the various absurd and sometimes shocking situations his young protagonist gets himself into in a way that is both humorous and heartbreakingly poignant at the same time. However, I think he overplays the humor a little. White’s protagonist is a confused gay boy growing up in the 1950s. He longs for love and romance, but he has no role models, and he knows no one will understand. I think one of the reasons he gets himself caught up in so many ridiculous scenarios is because he’s searching for an identity and a place were he fits in. He manages to fall in with a popular crowd a couple of times during his teen years, but he’s always acting, putting on airs. He never really feels like he belongs. The protagonist is never named, and I think the reason is the boy is lost and in a sense unclaimed. It may be true that most of us struggle with figuring out who we are and who we want to become during our teen years, but this boy has no real peers or real friends, and he can’t imagine he’ll ever be like the adult men he encounters. I don’t think we need to laugh at him so much, but since this was an autobiographical novel, maybe the only way White could tell the story is if he added a large dose of mirth. Maybe that’s the only way he could bear it.

I was surprised by the number of sexual adventures the boy had despite the time period. He has an experience with a developmentally disabled boy at a summer camp when he’s about 13. At 14, he has sex with a male prostitute. Then he and a few boys from his boarding school go to a whore house, and he has a sexual encounter with a female prostitute. At 15, he has sex with one of his teachers and his wife at the same time, and that summer, at his father’s vacation home, he allows the 12-year-old son of his father’s guests to corn hole him.

When I first read A Boy’s Own Story, I greedily drank all of this in. I had some experiences with boys when I was 11, 12 and 13, with one boy in particular, but high school was completely dry, so to speak. By the time I got to college, I was burning with lust and longing. The boy in the story never found intimacy, but he did have sex, and at 20, I was still stinging from all those years when I had to hide my sexuality in a dark dungeon, so I was a little jealous of his juvenile escapades.

Reading the story again as a middle-aged man, I was struck by the difference in the way White’s protagonist, and presumably White himself, lived as compared to the way I lived when I was young. White’s character had certain advantages I only dreamed of. The boy’s father was wealthy. The father was able to support himself and his new wife and the boy, the boy’s sister and his mother. The father paid for the boy to go to boarding school. He could afford to send the boy to a kooky psychoanalyst. The boy went from his mother’s apartment in the city, to his boarding school, to his father’s mansion and his father’s lake house. No one in his family was particularly religious, and certainly no one was evangelical. So the boy didn’t grow up fearing moral condemnation. He thought he might be mentally ill, which is bad enough, but he never saw himself as a sinner or feared that kind of judgment from others. He even came out to his parents, his psychoanalyst, his roommate at school, his teacher and the teacher’s wife.

I guess I might be jealous of the boy for several reasons, even though the boy’s life was far from ideal, but at least no one, except for his sister, tired to burden him with too much shame, and he never feared being physically harmed or thrown out into the street. He had an intellectual curiosity which he was allowed to nurture and develop. The boy was reading great literature, philosophy and studying Buddhism before he was old enough to drive. I think his intellectual tendencies and the fact that his parents were not particularly controlling and the fact that they didn’t have many expectations saved him from a lot of grief.

Life Preserver

A little dream came to me earlier. I was thinking that if I ever won the lottery or if someone left me a significant amount of money, it might be cool if I used it to open a small boarding school for wallflowers. It’s a pipedream I know, but I thought I would share it with you anyway because I think extreme social anxiety is a huge problem for those of us who experience it regularly.

We often use the word “shy” to describe those who have a hard time interacting with others and making friends, but that’s a rather weak word for someone who has been struggling for years. And it almost always starts in childhood, doesn’t it? Some kids don’t mix with the other kids. They pull away. They look down at their feet. They physically remove themselves from the group whenever they get the chance. I don’t think we take that as seriously as we should. We recognize that certain problems and disorders can limit a young person’s opportunities in life, but more often than not, we tell “shy” kids they should just get over it. There’s also the assumption that they’ll “grow out of it.”

The trouble is, many of them can’t simply get over it, and many don’t grow out of it, and I suspect that those kids are much more susceptible to depression and more likely to be suicidal. Social isolation is excruciatingly painful. I also think that many intensely shy kids never reach their full potential as adults. So much of success depends on our ability to schmooze. Intelligence, education and skill can only get you so far. At some point, you have to communicate, and if this is something that’s dreadful and excruciating for you, you’re in trouble.

Maybe experts could create a curriculum specifically designed to help young wallflowers overcome their anxiety. Maybe they could undergo intensive therapy while in school, too. I think it would be best if this special school was a boarding school because the world tends to be frightening to socially awkward people, and one of the reasons is because few understand what they’re going through. Their awareness of how over the top their reactions to ordinary situations are serves to make them feel all the more freakish. But what if they were surrounded by peers who had the same affliction? What if the staff of the school were specially trained to understand?

I also think a boarding school might help because there is often something about the environment of socially awkward youth that is exacerbating the problem. I know that was true in my case.

I felt like I was in danger so much of the time, and I didn’t feel like I could truly open up to anyone. I didn’t trust others, and I didn’t trust myself. I was always thinking that I would say or do the wrong thing. Everything seemed dangerous except solitude. I think the prolonged experience wore a grove in my brain, and even now when I try to push myself too hard by doing the things others do all the time, I become emotionally unstable.

I know there are many young people who are experiencing the same difficulties I did, and I know many of them will lead lonely lives. Many will end up poor. Some may eventually have to apply for disability. I wish there was a way to throw at least some of them a life preserver and save them from all of that.

Ole Smoky Candy Kitchen

For the first six years of my life, going on vacation meant an August trip to our small, rustic, family owned cabin near Sherwood Lake, West Virginia. Then in the summer of 1973, we went to the Smoky Mountains. In the evenings, we explored the tourist town of Gatlinburg. You could watch a man making taffy at the Ole Smoky Candy Kitchen. I was fascinated by that. Of course, we bought a box. We bought a box every time we went. Even though things have changed a lot over the years, the Ole Smoky Candy Kitchen is still there, still making and selling taffy, and apparently they’re still using the same box cover.

The self-perpetuating hell of fundamentalism.

This is a clip from the documentary The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia. If you don’t know what a redneck is, you will after watching this film. The Whites are alcoholics, drug addicts, drug dealers, swindlers, fighters, they disturb the peace, engage in acts of vandalism, and a couple of them are murderers. The documentary sugarcoats nothing. We see the absolute worst side of this family, and all of their dysfunctions are on full display.

But the documentary also humanizes them. We discover that they have been belittled, mistreated and abused since earliest childhood by other family members and by the community at large. These people were taught daily that they are scum, and it sank in. There is also a fatalism present in this family that reflects the greater culture of the south. There’s this idea that things are the way they are, and there’s no way to change any of it.

In this clip, we see Mamie laughing in the face of death, but in the full documentary, the scene goes on, and Mamie stops being defiant. She becomes quiet and reflective, and she eventually reveals that she believes in hell. Mamie is convinced that she is going to burn in hell forever. Even though Mamie isn’t at all religious—you’re not going to catch Mamie going to church on Sunday morning—she still internalized the basic fundamentalist beliefs that permeate the culture in which she was raised.

I think large sections of rural America are, at least in part, like this. Even many of those who aren’t religious have basic fundamentalist beliefs. It’s in the air, and many never hear about alternative worldviews. Many grow up without having any role models who are educated. Many know little about history or science, and they have little respect for school or learning or reading. It’s not that they’re stupid. Many people like Mamie are, in their way, quite clever, but their intellectual skills have never been developed, and their knowledge base is minimal.

When David Barton and others claim that this country was founded as a Christian country and that our Constitution was inspired by the Bible, and when Ken Ham and others claim that creationism is just as scientifically valid as evolution, they are speaking to people like Mamie and their family members and neighbors who have gotten religion. They don’t know any better. It sounds legit to them.