This got a bit rambly and meandering, but….

So I keep thinking about these little issues to do with the suggestions of feminists, race-equality activists, etc. when they call for the more privileged (I’ve talked about the use of this word before and how I don’t necessarily think it’s appropriate, but it is part of the accepted discourse of the movement(s), and so I will continue to use it here for convenience’s sake) to act in particular ways to steer us further towards equality. And I often hope that no one’s thinking that by making all these arguments I’m implying that I don’t support equality, or even that I don’t support the privileged actively striving to examine their privileges and working to fight -isms starting with their own actions. I do support these things.

But partly because I do support these things, I think that when suggestions are made in favour of them that have flaws or issues, it’s good to examine those fairly– and the activist circles tend to shut down on that sort of thing, saying it distracts from the topic at hand. Personally, I think that can lead to problems of any suggestion in your favour blindly being passed without thinking about the impact it might have on others or getting to examine why reasonable, thoughtful people might not do that thing, so I like to deconstruct those things. And it’s not even always about coming down on the side of “this thing you’re asking of us privileged people is unreasonable”; a lot of the time, it’s really about “I can see why you want this, and I’d like to find a way for you to have it, but understand that a lot of people will find it hard”, or “yes, it’s right for you to have this, but here’s a little side issue that I think it’s fair to also address, because I don’t think it’s bad for people to have this contradictory thing, either, and we need to find a solution”.

This particular discussion is along the latter lines.

Specifically, I want to talk about the role of human curiosity in treatment of minority groups. Because a lot of complaints about privileged people from non-white racial groups, disabled people, and other groups whose physical appearance or behaviour is in the minority involve actions that, I think, stem from simple curiosity: asking to touch hair, or about the origin of clothing or jewellery, is a common one, but also quoted, especially by disabled people, is staring.

We’re taught as children not to stare at others, even (especially) if they catch our attention. It’s simply not seen as polite, and for a good reason: no one wants to feel like their actions and appearance are being scrutinised. We are capable of gathering en masse and not being hugely socially uncomfortable because, in a crowd, everyone tacitly agrees to more or less ignore everyone else.

But how does this balance with the desire to satiate curiosity?

I know this must sound very strange: as if someone’s curiosity could ever outweigh the right of someone, especially someone who probably gets constant attention because of their appearance, to be left alone. It doesn’t really upset anyone to not satisfy their curiosity; at worst they might be a little disappointed. The black or disabled person, however, might feel the weight of a hundred stares per day, perhaps more, and this could be profoundly upsetting for them. Shouldn’t we do our best to alleviate that burden, not intensify it?

I do generally tend to think so, and because I know that in practice it’s extremely difficult to clarify to someone whether you’re staring in a good or a bad way, and that even if you could an overburdened person might not care, I try not to stare at people I’m curious about. But I also think that there’s something that’s being missed here: most human curiosity, when it comes to unusual-looking people, is not vicious or mean-spirited. It isn’t looking for flaws to point at and mock. It just wants to know. People have an inherent drive to learn which is triggered when they encounter something outside their experience.

I’m just wondering idly if, in an ideal world, people who wished to satiate that drive harmlessly could be allowed to do it. I don’t like making people feel uncomfortable, but I don’t like the fact that in order for society to go smoothly we have to pretend a lot of the time that we don’t care about things we do care about, or vice versa. I hold the ideological perspective that it should generally be okay for us to be ourselves, and that if we’re not explicitly seeking to cause harm, it would be ideal if society were better able to accept our lack of harmful intent (obviously depending on the circumstances: “I didn’t mean to cause harm by pushing that burning oil drum off a building onto that grandmothers’ convention” is not the same as “I didn’t mean to cause harm by asking about your father when I didn’t know he was dead”).

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take care with our words and actions, because right now we do live in a society where many of us have been conditioned to be easily upset, and we do need to be mindful of others’ feelings. But I suppose I dream of a society where people who have no animosity in mind can be honest, without causing offence. I’m thinking I’d like it to be okay for someone to be curious about someone’s physical appearance, and be able to look at them, possibly even admire them, and have that not bother the person. And I know that’s not really possible in this world right now; but at the very least what I would like is this, and basically, for all that I’ve waffled above this is my main point:

I’d like for it to be acknowledged ideologically that curiosity is okay, that it’s not a bad thing, and that even if we shouldn’t practice it in some circumstances for the sake of people’s happiness, it’s still a shame and a loss that we can’t.

Maybe it’s not a big loss. Maybe it doesn’t outweigh the desires of others to be left alone. But it’s still not ideal that society is this way.

(This brought to you, incidentally, by spending the last leg of my recent flight back to England next to a boy who, despite having only one arm and that being deformed, was still able to play his DS. I thought that was pretty awesome.)

“The first thing you do is to forget that I’m a Reyvateil.”

Hmm, so… I was reading this article, and the statement at the core of it– that the correct way to treat oppressed minorities is summed up by “The first thing you do is to forget that I’m [black/female/disabled/etc.]. Second, you must never forget that I’m [black/female/disabled/etc.]“– is something that I nodded at, but less in agreement and more in “actually, that really sums up what a lot of activist groups seem to want people to do, and you know, it’s really hard.”

As the blogger continues to say, specifically referencing the treatment of non-white people, “They make a seemingly impossible suggestion: that white folks must be aware of the fact that the experiences and cultures of people of color are different, but they must not fixate on those differences to the extent that the behavior becomes tokenizing, or discomforting, or – possibly worst of all – self-aggrandizing.” It’s hard to notice difference, be aware that this difference is meaningful and has made these people the target of abuse and oppression, and not subsequently have your actions stilted or distorted by that heightened awareness. It’s hard to be vigilant while being casual. It’s hard to treat people with special care while at the same time treating them just like everyone else.

I’ve been guilty of feeling uncomfortable when oppressed groups ask for this. If my attention is called to the fact that I should be sensitive towards someone because of their colour, I immediately cannot stop worrying about whether I’m doing it right or wrong, whether I’m doing too much or not enough, whether I’m going to be offensive, etc. This makes me socially anxious, and thus more likely to do stupid things. And I’ll be brutally honest here: I don’t want this to be the case, but it causes me to see the person as a little more threatening and a little less human. Not because I inherently believe anyone deserves to be seen as less human than anyone else, but because I feel thrown off guard by the panic-response of “how should I act? How should I act? Will they hate me if I don’t act right?”, and my response to that is to feel less comfortable and more defensive around the person. It has nothing to do with my believing any of the differences between myself and them make them bad, and has everything to do with the fact that trying to act normal when my attention has been drawn to someone is something I do not do easily.

It’s as simple as noticing them by accident. Oh, I’m looking at them now. Should I be looking? Is that okay? Maybe I should look away. But then they might think I’m purposely trying to ignore them. So maybe I should look. But that’s going to look like I’m staring. It is impossible to act naturally once you start think about how you’re supposed to act.

But at the same time, the more I think about that statement– “The first thing you do is to forget that I’m [black/female/disabled/etc.]. Second, you must never forget that I’m [black/female/disabled/etc.]“– the more something about it does sink in and seem solid. At the core of it, this is what I do with my friends. I acknowledge that they may need to do some things differently from how I need to do them, that they may have special food preferences or social needs or squicks or cultural leanings that I have to respect and work with; but I don’t think of them as a collection of those needs and squicks and leanings, or stereotype them based on those. I just try to be careful of them and to be mindful of when they might arise.

The problem is that it’s trickier with altering the way you relate to someone based on their cultural group as opposed to as an individual, particularly when it’s an oppressed cultural group, because you don’t know their individual preferences, and you have to go on what you know about the culture, and most members of oppressed groups don’t like being stereotyped based on that. And you can always ask, but if you don’t know someone well, asking isn’t always easy, and may be presumptuous and annoying in and of itself. I am sometimes going to be casual with my friends and go, “lol, I suppose you don’t want the [insert food here], then”, because they’re my friends and I know them enough to know when I can do that without offending them, but taking the same tack with someone you don’t know well is likely to be problematic. It’s not easy; but then I suppose social reform never is.

Oppression hurts the oppressors: a theory.

So I’ve been thinking lately about the idea that wrongdoing (of the type that involves harm to others and does not involve obvious harm to the self) ultimately hurts the person bringing it about as well as the victim of the wrongdoing. I specifically say “as well as” instead of “as much as”; I think measuring hurt in quantities is not really possible except in the most extreme of cases (a pricked finger versus losing a limb/one’s whole life’s work and reputation/one’s life), is only ever really applicable when we speak of physical injuries, which we are not doing here (as the impact of an incident, whether seemingly large or seemingly small, on any given person’s mind is not measurable and differs wildly between people– some people might not react strongly to being kidnapped and held at gunpoint, yet a casual slur could echo in their minds for years), and is ultimately not useful in that it tends to bring about the very problem that plagues this entire situation: the feeling that one person in the scenario has been “more hurt”, or that their hurt is more legitimate, because they were not the one who set out to do the hurting.

There’s a very strong feeling in our society*– so strong that it’s almost impossible to escape from– that the “victim” in any given scenario, the one who did not intend to take part in it, is the only one whose hurt is worth treating, caring about or even acknowledging. By contrast, we don’t attempt to heal the perpetrator of a wrongdoing, typically (and if we do, it is usually for the sake of making society safer from their wrongdoings, not for the perpetrator themselves, and puts definite emphasis on their being a criminal who needs reform rather than a victim). Instead, we often hurt them, restricting their freedoms or otherwise inconveniencing them in some way. This is so standardised in our society that we don’t even think twice about it, typically. Even if we don’t believe in punishment, it still feels natural to most people that there is only one victim of a wrongdoing and only one person whose injuries from it deserve treatment. The reasoning for this is probably twofold: firstly, the feeling that the perpetrator of a wrongdoing did what they did willingly, and so any injury that comes to them because of it is “their own fault”; and secondly, the lack of recognition, in general, that committing a wrongdoing could ever harm anyone.

But I think it does harm. In my opinion as a layperson when it comes to psychology, in the case of the non-sociopathic individual (that is, someone who is capable of feeling remorse for their wrongdoings), there will likely be any combination of emotional conflict, guilt, worry, fear, sadness, self-hatred, and self-doubt working their way through a person as a result of any wrongdoing they have committed. There will also possibly be, because of these pains, a tendency to escape these burdening feelings by redefining the wrongdoing as an acceptable thing in their mind, thus pushing a person further away from a mindset in which they are inclined to examine their morality. One could argue that “they brought this on themselves”, but when one commits a wrongdoing, do they really understand the full extent to which it can damage them? Furthermore, does not the idea that it is “their own fault” suggest a person who from the outset is naturally amoral, who has not been subject to negative influence from their environment but is simply inclined to be bad? And if even if the above two conditions were the case, does it then follow that it is wrong to help the person or to see them as injured when they are? If a cruel person were the victim of a wrongdoing in which they played no part, would we not still treat them as the victim?

I think because wrongdoing harms, that harm should be cared for and treated in all cases, not followed with more harm, leading to ever more twisted and corrupt individuals who feel outcast and unloved by society, falling ever further from its embrace. This goes against people’s natural tendencies very strongly; the victims of wrongdoing often feel that to be kind to the wrongdoer is an outrage, because their hurts are legitimate (i.e. in a form recognised by society; for example, we recognise that being the victim of violent crime often traumatises people) and they did nothing to deserve it (implying that it is morally good that those who do harm receive harm in return), and, perhaps, ultimately, because to treat the wrongdoer as someone in the same position as them, “on the same side” as them, when this person has clearly made themselves The Enemy to the victim, seems abhorrent.

But if we are to progress as a society we must abandon the idea of an enemy: of a human whose existence, whose health and wellbeing, are in opposition to ours and whose happiness is of insufficient concern that they can be freely mistreated. One’s opinions, one’s actions, might be in opposition to ours or even a threat to our very lives, but if we do not seek to recognise, consistently, that no human’s inherent being is in opposition to ours, that we are all on the same side in life, that we all deserve to live and be happy, the idea that the wellbeing of anyone who opposes you should be ignored will continue to propagate, and that is an entirely arbitrary and wrongheaded notion– as one should know the second they realise it immediately applies to each “side” in the eyes of the other. The inward flinching we feel at the thought of our “enemies” being cared for is a vengeful, divisive notion. The idea that it matters “who was hurt more” is a vengeful, divisive notion. There was hurt, and it should be repaired, that all humans may live better lives.

I heard once– sadly I can’t remember where– of a society where those who commit actions that the law defines as criminal are brought into a circle of their peers and told, by each, of their good deeds and the good things about their nature. Apparently, this society has a very low crime rate. When we continue to wound those who are already wounded enough that their sense of empathy does not hold them back from doing harm, do we really think we are going to save them, or are we condemning them immediately, categorising them as criminals and cutting them off from kindness, no longer conscious of their humanity or caring if they become better people? Have we already decided that they have broken the rules and thus are outcast?

Furthermore, is this morally good? If it is wrong to hurt, to take from another’s human freedoms, to punish, to imprison, is it ever right to do those things to anyone, at any time, regardless of what they have done to others? Is it right to do those things just because you’re the government? Is it right, ever?

Furthermore– and this is more a (rhetorical) question for me personally than anything else– is it spiritually right, by my beliefs? Is it right to divide people into “criminal” and “victim”? Is it right to perpetuate notions that humankind can be split into enemy groups, to perpetuate the idea that it is rightful for the victim to feel resentment and anger when the perpetrator of a crime is well-treated, to pit human against human and thus parts of the universe against itself– to say that opposing groups are not worthy of love, are not worthy of understanding, from each other, and that we should not attempt to facilitate this, that it is a lost cause? Is that not to deny that the very nature of the universe is a united whole?

*By which I mean Generic Western English-Speaking Society that I don’t really have a word for.

A step away from “fight for what’s right”….

I ran across a quote today that made me squirm, as part of an advertisement for activist clothing designs: “if you’re right, you can’t be too radical”.

Even if one takes that statement literally, assuming someone who is right, that isn’t true; though your cause may be right, that doesn’t legitimise you to do terrible things in the name of it. It’s not okay to hurt others because you’re right. It’s not okay to ignore human rights because you’re right. It’s not okay to step on people on the way to your goal because you’re right. But another big problem I have with that statement is that we can’t apply that statement in this world, because in the vast majority of cases we can’t know we’re right. We think we’re right. We have our opinions on what’s right. But we usually can’t know we are right, and the last thing ads should be doing is stoking our natural inclination to assume that we’re right and stop examining ourselves.

I say this as someone who’s been right about some things (in my world, at least, it’s possible to know), and thought I was right about others. Both of these things led me to act pretty awfully.

Of course, I may not be right on this either. But that’s what I believe, currently.

Narrative, and why “it’s okay to be gay” is sometimes a counterproductive plot.

The other day I found myself looking for children’s books dealing with non-traditional families on Amazon; at first I was simply curious as to what was out there, wondering how things had improved, if at all, since Heather Has Two Mommies, but the more I read the more I really wanted more of these books to get into the hands of children, and saved several titles for possible later purchase and surreptitious Bookcrossing. Among them, if you’re curious, were The Different Dragon (which sounds like an absolutely wonderful story in general; who wouldn’t have wanted, as a child, a story that told them “people think dragons are supposed to be mean and aggressive, but sometimes they just want to be nice, and that’s a good thing”? It seems like it sends a lovely message about stereotypes, individuality, cruelty as “acceptable” versus gentleheartedness as “wimpy” and maladaptive, and, of course, dragons.) and Uncle Bobby’s Wedding.

I picked these two for a specific reason, one that struck me as an important criterion while searching through the available books: they present the non-standard families as incidental, rather than the focus being on the gay or lesbian family and how most people think they’re “strange” but it’s eventually revealed that it’s okay to be different. While I think this message may be valid and useful in some contexts– I think it’s positive, as in the case of The Different Dragon, to tell children “some people might expect you to be tough and strong, but it’s really actually fine if you’re not and you shouldn’t feel social pressure to be so”– I think that GLBTBBQ literature for children runs the risk of overdoing it to the point where a child might feel, “wait, you keep saying it’s okay but it also definitely seems like it’s strange and a lot of people don’t like it; this is kind of discomforting”. I’m trying to put my finger on the difference between the two, and I think it’s that if a child is capable of taking away the message that X thing is okay without a demonstration that a lot of people don’t think it is, then there shouldn’t be such a demonstration. If you just portray a character who’s gentle and kind and liked by others for being so in a young children’s book, children might not take away the message that it’s okay to be gentle and kind– it’s too subtle for them– and they probably won’t feel too comforted when those who think they’re weak for it bully them. But if a book shows that a character has two mommies, that’s all it needs to do; you don’t need to point out to the child that having two mommies is non-standard. If other kids in the playground say “having two mommies is weird”, the child will think back to the book, where it seemed normal enough. I suppose it’s the difference between a character trait, which a child is less likely to pick up on, and a physical difference that is very obvious; two mommies are obviously two mommies and not a mommy and daddy, but a young child might not be able to grasp the concept of “this character is gentle, and therefore it’s okay to be” without some context.

Anyway, my ultimate feeling on this is that framing a behaviour or lifestyle you want a child to think is okay as “abnormal but still okay” should be avoided where possible. And I tend to dislike seeing it in adult literature, too, partly because the “everyone hates us because we’re female/gay/etc.” story has been done so many times before, and partly because in these stories, the marginalised group is still marginalised, at least at the beginning. And I don’t know about you, but I really prefer to read stories where the groups I’m part of are accepted and normative than ones that re-represent the struggle we’ve already gone through to be recognised; if I’m part of a group that’s misunderstood, I already know that we’re misunderstood, have already heard the story and been upset by it, and would prefer to explore different options and possibilities rather than retreading what I already know is true (usually followed by Marginalised Group A becoming non-marginalised, but only at the expense of the Oppressor group and a lot of “we told you so!” crowing, or worse). This sort of fantasy is probably cathartic for some people, but I really don’t enjoy the sort of vicarious vengeful smugness we’re supposed to take from it, and I think it engenders a backlash response that I don’t think is any more useful than the original prejudice. I’d rather explore completely different solutions to the problem, or imagine worlds where the problem doesn’t exist and see what we can learn from those to apply to our own situation.

(I also want to say that I feel it’s more female-positive to write about a society where gender is treated as incidental than to write about one where the undervalued female class must wage war, but I admit that I don’t really have the right to define what counts as “female-positive”. I would like your thoughts on the matter, though.)

Today curious cat is curious about… pro-life campaigners.

Recently I’ve had the “pro-life” (as in, anti-abortion) argument come up in conversation, and I’ve been trying to wrap my head around what the ideal, the moral, behind it actually is. As I’ve mentioned before in this journal, my feelings on abortion in general are ambivalent and largely unformed, but if the mother’s life is in danger I support it over allowing a baby to be born into the world motherless and an individual with an already-formed life, loves, attachments and concerns to die. To let an already existing person die so that another person might come to be– well, that’s a cycle of life that occurs naturally all the time, and certainly has its place, but I don’t believe in encouraging it prematurely. There’s more to a life’s being precious than the fact of simply being alive, even if that in itself is a dearly valuable thing. Of course, I’m aware that that is only my opinion, and that there is no right answer, no choice that will not cause harm, when it comes to the decision between saving a mother and saving a child.

But my feelings aside, and I’ve said this before but perhaps not in so much detail, as it wasn’t the topic at the time– the “pro-life” movement really is not. They’ve essentially appropriated the phrase “respect life”, in much the same way as the religious right has appropriated “family values”, and yet they don’t respect “life” at all; they respect a very specific subset of life. Pro-life campaigners aren’t interested in the lives of mothers. Nor are they (as a movement; I obviously can’t speak for the individuals involved) interested in the lives of starving people, homeless people, prisoners of war, cancer sufferers, children beyond the age of zero, animals, plants, or anyone or anything except, well, fetuses. If you’re going to appropriate such a huge phrase as “respect life”, if you’re going to claim “pro-life” as your ideology, then in my mind you should be demonstrating a concern for just that value, not your specific narrowed-down interpretation of what that value ought to mean. And frankly, if your idea of respecting life involves considering the lives of all the other aforementioned groups inconsequential, not only do you have very strange concepts of “respect” and “life”, you have a very strange ideology in general.

As I said in the first paragraph, I am unable to quite wrap my mind around what drives the “pro-life” movement; what causes such an intense and passionate concern for a specific, small subset of individuals to the exclusion of all else. To a certain extent I can understand passionate activism for, say, cancer research or better treatment of war prisoners, because people involved in these causes often know the suffering second-hand through friends and family if not first-hand, and are aware that there’s a one-sided problem that needs to be solved. But what makes someone side so intensely with a barely-developed party, the precise experiences of which none of us can be sure of and none of us remember first-hand, over another, at least equally valid, human life?

Is it that the moral decision is such a difficult one– that there really is no right answer, and they can feel better about the fact that it happens by taking a side, convincing themselves of all the things that side has in its favour, and doggedly sticking to it? Is it that they’re so disturbed by the idea of abortion in non-emergency circumstances, and have worked themselves up so much with the gory details, that they’re unable to put aside their emotions when it comes to more ambiguous cases– that they’ve focused on babies so much that they’ve learnt to care so much more for them than for any other instance of life, and can’t switch that off? Or is it, as I suspect is the vilifying of homosexuals and the absence of interest in just about any other cause in certain religious groups, driven by the same motivation behind most wars, sports, active racism* and other instances of factionalisation and division in human society: the desire to name and attack an enemy? I’d be less likely to consider this as an option if anti-abortion campaigners weren’t so fervent about it, so inclined to propaganda and twisting of the facts, almost seeming to enjoy getting riled up about abortion in a way that, for example, lung cancer research campaigners never quite seem to get about their issue, despite the fact that most lung cancer activism is focused on a preventable cause.

*I am not attempting to argue that these three are equal, only that they are often driven by a similar need; the need to proudly belong to one group and discriminate against another. Sports are certainly a near-to-harmless outlet for such emotion, though I believe it’s important that people recognise sports as a way of channelling and defusing that emotion, and not as validation of the emotion’s purpose in society– which, in a civilised era of plenty, I don’t believe it has. That’s potential essay-fodder for another time, however.

Q: Where do atheists get their morals? A: The same place everyone else does.

A couple of musings floating around in my head, today… (I’ve been reading this blog, and I had to stop to think: can they literally be said to be in my head? My thoughts on how much each of soul and body is involved in terms of where consciousness resides are a little shaky; an entry for another day, perhaps.)

In any case, first off, I saw this quote/question mentioned on a friend of a friend’s blog (actually, it was mentioned by the friend of a friend as having first appeared on the blog of a friend of one of their friends, meaning it originated on a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend’s blog, assuming no incidental closer relationship between any of the friends involved that would shortcut this chain; but that’s getting quite aside the point, now):

For the atheists/agnostics: where do you turn for moral guidance?

The person in question, being an atheist, responded as one might expect, if you’ve seen such questions put to atheists before: my morality comes from my own personal conscience, from my evaluation of the world and perception of what seems to be right and wrong based on that, from my instinct and gut feeling on such matters. But for the first time here I noticed the phrasing of the question, and realised it assumed something that, in retrospect, I shouldn’t have been surprised it assumed, but was: that those who believe in a deity derive their morality from (suppositions about) that deity.

I am a deeply spiritual person, as I’m sure anyone reading this at time of posting knows. “Deeply” is perhaps an understatement; my spirituality is intricately threaded into every aspect of my life. I’ve been described by others as spending a good portion of my waking life in a meditative state. I am perhaps one of the most spiritually-minded people I know. But I would not say that I derive my morality from my spirituality. In fact, I consider the two to be quite necessarily separate. In part this is due to the way in which I perceive the spiritual– as something fundamentally good, tending towards goodness for all, yet often operating on a timescale and order of magnitude from which it is difficult to derive laws and tenets that are applicable to the details of human interaction. Spirituality, for me, is about the workings of existence, and I derive my morality from it about as much as I derive it from science. However, given what I know about how most religious people treat spirituality– not as something to be searched for within and through the self, but as something read in a book and taken as, well, gospel, hence the phrase– I find this thought a particularly unpleasant one; particularly when it is combined, as it so often is, with the idea that a religious morality is superior to a morality derived from within.

I do not subscribe to the teaching of many religions that the morality within one’s own heart is inherently sinful and flawed, and thus we must look to a deific source for our morals. I do not believe that any of the holy books that claim to provide a moral framework laid down by God are much more than the writings of humans. I believe that the morality we find inside ourselves– and, indeed, the spirituality we find inside ourselves, by searching through our own minds and bodies, as opposed to through belief in writings and doctrines as absolute– is the only morality we have and the only one we need. I do not think a legitimate morality can come without self-examination, without cross-referencing with the self– the internal conscience, the pulls and cords of the heart. I do not think it can be lifted, wholesale, from a book. I think it is dangerous to try, and doubly dangerous to assume that such a “God-derived” morality is superior to an internal one.

I found myself idly wondering this morning: what is it, aside from personal morality, that keeps people from committing crimes? Specifically, is it social or legal consequences that offer the greatest deterrent to crime?

My vague theory is that, in practice, it is actually a fear of shame and social ostracism that keeps people from committing many (particularly smaller) crimes, as opposed to the threat of legal repercussion. For example, we would be extremely embarrassed if we were caught stealing from a store; yet we are much more likely to “steal” music from the safety of our own computers, where no one can see us (except possibly the RIAA) and in a context that society generally considers acceptable (you are much more likely to be thought poorly of for stealing a loaf of bread than for downloading a song). Some people, admittedly, might have moral objections to stealing from stores where physical items are taken, as opposed to theft of software where no physical item is actually lost because only data is being taken, but my feeling is that most people don’t think it through that much. It could also be the case that people realise that online music theft is much less likely to result in prosecution than actual theft. But still, I can’t help wondering if one of the main reasons crime does not run rampant is that people are ashamed to be criminals, rather than that they fear legal consequences; if it is interpersonal, rather than political, glue that holds the structure of society together.

A thought that blossomed into an essay.

I was thinking today about how one of the problems, perhaps, with society is that people have difficult recognising the significance of the non-physical. I am not, here, referring strictly to the spiritual; I think that if one has the idea in mind that there is a spiritual, non-physical component to life, one might be less likely to act in ways which disparage other non-physical parts of existence, which will be the topic of this essay and which I’ll get to in a moment. However, that certainly always isn’t the case, and “spiritual” people can be as hypocritical, and atheists as sensitive and aware, as anyone. (I put “spiritual” in quotes here because I think a part of true spirituality does involve awareness and pushing through ignorance. Hypocrisy, willing or unwilling blindness, and reluctance to give things consideration are at odds with spirituality.)

There are many components of our human experience that are non-physical, ones recognised as existing by the vast majority of humans, such as the emotions and the conscience. (There is also intuition, though that walks a line between being accepted and being written off as whimsy.) While we can argue that emotions have a chemical basis and thus are technically “physical” (though it is more difficult to pinpoint from whence the conscience comes), this is not my point. Rather, my point is that we do not see their physical effects or origins.

When a physical thing changes state, we can perceive it through our senses, which we believe to be objective and to relate directly to what is before us. Though most people know that the senses can be fooled, we have enough experience with physical objects to have formulated a set of rules for how they behave relative to how they appear. We can make sense of them, and we can say with relative confidence that if we see a green frog in front of us, then the being that we refer to as “a green frog” is present, and that we can interact with it as we would expect to interact with a frog (green or otherwise, most likely). As such, the existence of a frog is something hard to write off, muddle the purpose of, pretend “isn’t really a frog”, or dismiss if the frog is relevant to us. (For example, if we were looking for a frog, and we saw this frog, we could not so easily say to ourselves any more, “we’ve lost our frog”. The frog is right there, and most sane people would recognise that and act accordingly.)

A frog isn’t an especially good example, though. Not many people care whether or not a frog is present at any given time. Let’s take a more drastic example: a knife. If we are swinging a knife around carelessly, and we hit someone with the knife, we’ll feel very bad. Even if it’s only a small cut, we’ve done damage. We’ll probably panic and rush to attend to it even if the damage is really less than it seems, all the while profusely apologising. We find it extremely hard to pierce or cut someone intentionally, even only a little. To stab someone in the arm or slash them across the chest, a wound that they will likely recover from, is something that most people could never bring themselves to do. Our visceral horror at the idea is too strong, and part of the reason for this is that the harm is visible. We know what the outpouring of blood means for humans. We are instinctively revolted by wounds. There can be no question in our minds that we have caused pain to another being.

However, the same person who would never dream of stabbing another human, who would consider that that would make them a psychopath, might easily be able to yell and scream at them and fling painful insults. Most people don’t attack their friends with knives, but almost all of us at some point have wielded a sharp word. You can cut someone’s skin with a knife and in a week or so there’ll be no sign that you’ve touched them; in a year they probably won’t even remember that you were being a little careless in the kitchen while showing off your mid-air vegetable dicing technique, and scratched their arm a little. But fling one insult and it may stick with that person for life, if they don’t take steps to recover. You can stab someone and they’ll be better in a few months, but if you wound someone’s emotional self, that damage can alter the way they think. It can be repaired, but it’s so much harder. (This statement is not, of course, meant as a condoning of physical violence. It is rather a condemning of emotional violence.)

We wield words so much more carelessly than we wield knives, but we consider it much worse to do the latter– to the point that we consider drawing blood to be “violence”, when we rate movies and television shows as being suitable for certain age groups, but we very rarely consider a scene of one person verbally abusing another to be so. We don’t viscerally react to others’ emotional pain in the same way. And I think part of the reason we don’t react is that we can’t see it– see tears, yes, outward manifestations of it, but we cannot see the damage itself in the same way that we can see mangled flesh and outpourings of blood. We don’t see the state change, cannot observe a clear transformation in another being from happy mind to scared, confused, injured mind. We see a physical wound and we shudder, because we think that someone’s very person has been compromised, their internal structure harmed. But an emotional wound is a much deeper blow, much closer to the core of the person than any physical harm could be. Our emotions are seen as ephemeral, fickle, half-there things that can easily be warped and changed as we please; an emotional wound is seen as a lighter wound, something that can be shrugged off much more easily. Yet they are far and away the most fragile parts of us. (The only real exception to this assumption seems to be sexual assault, which I think is treated– in society; in all of this essay I am referring to what I think are the perceptions of the average person, not the legal system– as much worse than regular assault specifically because of the emotional factor. However, I think the damage that arises from sexual assault is perceived to be significant only for falling into a specific narrow category; somehow, we have managed to internalise that it leaves lasting scars and horrible memories for someone to be maltreated sexually, but have not allowed that conviction to spread to other forms of emotional abuse, which is what sexual abuse, physical harm notwithstanding, essentially is. Someone who verbally assaults a person, even if the verbal abuse is humiliating and hurtful, is not seen as nearly so vile, or as having done nearly as great a wrong, as someone who sexually assaults, whether physical harm was done or not.)

If we thought that every time we said a cruel word, we were doing much worse than sticking a knife in someone, would we be more careful with our words? If we realised that the things we say to each other now might last a person’s lifetime, would we do more to recompense for the times when we are thoughtless? We all act on instinct sometimes, say careless things in the heat of the moment, and we should no more wallow in guilt over than than over having accidentally swung a knife and nicked a finger; we can make efforts to be less careless, but our own emotions are also a difficult thing to control, and we should not be too hard on ourselves if we slip. Sometimes we may say things that hurt without it being intended for them to, and that too is not to be faulted. But we can avoid, at least, stabbing people deliberately, and if we are of the mindset that we should not physically lash out because we do not want to wound, then we should not emotionally lash out, either.