Michael Karson, Ph.D.

Intelligence is Good

Nietzsche called himself an antichrist because he tried to restore some values that Christians had discarded. Nietzsche believed that it was once good to be strong and bad to be weak, but in an effort to make the weak feel better about themselves, Jesus had taught them that it was good to be weak and evil to be strong. Much the same thinking pervades the diversity discourse. You’re not supposed to say one worldview is superior to another, regardless of what you mean by superior. You’re not supposed to say that one person exceeds another on any dimension that has a positive connotation. It’s okay to say that one person is more extraverted than another if you are careful to specify that there’s nothing wrong with introversion. You can say that one person is smarter than another if you add words to the effect that intelligence is some sort of parlor trick, and of course less intelligent people are just as worthy as smart people.

But worthy of what? The Nazis undertook to murder people who were not sufficiently intelligent, so if you suggest that intelligence ought to be a factor in college admissions, you will likely be compared to Nazis. The Nazis thought that mentally retarded individuals were not worthy to live. And, yes, that is still the technical term for them, even if professional multiculturalists insist on “people with mental retardation” to emphasize what doesn’t need emphasizing—that they are people. But it’s possible to think that mentally retarded persons, or even people in the lower half of intelligence, are not worthy to sit on the Supreme Court or not worthy to have their ideas about physics carefully considered without thinking they are not worthy to have their civil rights protected.

And yes, I recognize that “intelligence” is bandied about as a substitute for other traits, and I recognize that it is not always easy to measure intelligence (though nowhere near as hard as you might think) and I loved Stephen Jay Gould’s book, The Mismeasure of Man, about abuses in intelligence testing. But come on, the fact that it is not always easy to tell how smart someone is doesn’t mean that it’s evil to consider the question. Everyone can see plainly that when Will Hunting solves the math problem, it’s a function of his being smarter than most janitors. My mom’s humorous definition of intelligence was “the extent to which other people agree with me,” which captured the problem that Gould wrote about. My definition of intelligence is “how well your brain works.” It isn’t easy to tell how well someone’s brain works, but it’s a concept not substantially different from understanding how well an arm or an immune system works.

“Mentally retarded” has become an offensive term, as have the equally neutral, equally scientific terms that preceded it. These include imbecile, idiot, and moron. “Retarded,” a fancy word for slow, will soon be replaced with “intellectual disability,” and two years from then, you will hear one school kid call another an “I.D.” And then you will refer, in a perfectly professional manner, to someone as a person with I.D., and someone will wag her finger at you and tell you that there’s nothing wrong with being different.

But there is something wrong with being mentally retarded, or well below average in intelligence in a college, or barely average in a graduate school or a profession. The reason the names for being in the bottom 2% (which is the definition of mental retardation) keep turning into insults is that the condition referred to is itself undesirable. That’s what’s meant by the word, disability, which is already in danger of being substituted with “differently abled.”

Some liberals must despise disabled people to go to such lengths to disguise their real impairments with vague language, as if the disability is too horrid to contemplate. Sorry. I should have said, “people with liberal ideas.”

How to stop worrying about resentment

“Perhaps you could say more about how to stop worrying about the frightened, resentful folks?”

I’ll try.

We tend to surround ourselves with friends and partners who respond positively to what we’ve been conditioned to show and negatively to what we’ve been conditioned to hide, since when we first met them, we showed what we show and hid what we hide. If the relationship worked well enough under those circumstances to lead to friendship or romance, it’s often because they liked what they saw and didn’t lose interest when they didn’t see what was hidden.

People also become friends and lovers for reasons other than liking each other; for example, they are thrown together by circumstances, or they over-emphasize physical attraction, or they have an arranged marriage. When this happens, each person tries to impose his or her definition of himself or herself within the relationship by showing or hiding various aspects of the self, and relationships then work well or work badly depending on what is accepted and what is rejected. Showing, hiding, accepting, and rejecting are thus the relevant behaviors that determine how our interpersonal world suits us.

In this respect, it’s not surprising that so many partners resemble a parent. After all, it was our parents who first conditioned us to show certain things and to hide others. To the extent that a partner has the same taste in humanity as your parents, you are likely to experience less conflict around who you are with that person (and less freedom around deciding who you want to be).

The thing to do, if you don’t want to just be a doll created by your parents, is to decide what your own values are, which aspects of the self you think should be treasured, and which managed. Of course, you can only choose among values you have encountered, so if you want to be free, you have to meet a lot of people with different values from yours, possibly by traveling to a lot of different places, possibly by having intimate conversations with the people you happen to meet nearby. You can also get a wide sampling of values by reading literature, history, and philosophy without ever leaving your computer screen. The greatest of these is literature.

Cognitively, the best way to achieve freedom is to learn critical thinking and to apply it to all propositions, not just scientific truths, but also to all propositions about yourself, whether they be emotional, spiritual, or behavioral. (Critical thinking is, in short, a verbal method of testing and contextualizing propositions that values evidence and logic.) Emotionally, the best way to achieve freedom is to spend time with people who value different aspects of yourself from those that you value and to see whether your values are really just ways of pretending that you are not who you are as opposed to ways of ordering and organizing all of who you are. Psychotherapy, when done right, is a place to discover and accept all the aspects of yourself, so you can behave according to your values rather than according to what you are afraid to discover about yourself.

So the way to stop trying to please people who fear or resent you is to treat your happiness, creativity, humor, and insight as you would like a four-year-old child to be treated at home and not as a four-year-old child ought to be treated at a funeral or other ceremonious occasion. Enjoy rather than hush yourself. Then, when someone resents you, you will react as you would react had the person just told you that your four-year-old niece’s fantasy play in her own room was “inappropriate.” You would tell your niece to pay no heed to the strange lady (and then, I hope, your niece would add to her game a disapproving bystander, to whom unexpected and embarrassing things would happen: “And this is the lady that thinks the funny girl is unladylike, but a bird flew by and now she’s a poopyhead”).

Women Who Hate Me

There seem to be three kinds of women in my life, sorted by their reactions when I am smart or funny or gleeful. The first kind appreciates my happy, intellectual, aggressive brand of play, and some of the members of this group even play along, smacking my serves back over the net as it were, putting their own spin on my ideas, making jokes of their own, surprising and being surprised. I am married to one of those. But in this group, even the ones who merely appreciate me, laughing at my jokes and getting my ideas, foster more jokes and more ideas. There are a lot of lesbians in this group, partly because lesbians have, at a much higher rate than straight women, liberated themselves from fairy tale fantasies of daintiness, and are not psychologically allergic to exuberance. Also, of course, lesbians as a rule don’t hate men or male energy—why would they?

The second group of women is afraid of me. Once, when my younger son was three years old, I asked him, “If you were an animal, what kind of animal would you be?” He said, “I thought we were dragons.” Impassioned speech, unexpected ideas, inappropriate humor—these strike this group of women as interesting, but only from a distance, like fire. They don’t actively avoid me, but neither do they approach me. They’re surprised if I act kindly, but they’re not really irritated by it, because they haven’t built an explanatory architecture around what they make of me or of themselves. When I run into one of them, I see they are watchful and ready to jump out of their skins. I avoid them, not because interacting with them is unpleasant, but because I find them boring unless I am authorized to comment on what is going on between us.

The third group resents me. I mean to use Nietzsche’s term for how the weak feel about the strong, how the unhappy feel about the happy, how the dull feel about those who shine. I doubt they would read a blog I wrote, but if they did, they would bristle at my referring to myself as strong and at my referring to any woman as weak. Generally, they express their resentment by snubbing me, but some of them will directly tell me that I am unaware of my male privilege or my white privilege, as if they think that it is only my maleness and whiteness that makes me funny or clever or lively. (I am not seeking credit, by the way, for my vitality; like feeling grateful rather than guilty for having privileges, I feel lucky to be someone who has good ideas and says funny things.) These are the women who think that if a woman says something smart in a group, it’s proof that women are as smart as men, rather than enjoying what she said, and if a man says something smart in a group, they think it’s proof that he is marginalizing others by taking up air time, rather than enjoying what he said. The only thing they tend to enjoy is a man’s (or an assertive woman’s) comeuppance.

For most of my life, I spent a lot of energy trying to get resentful women to like me. Seven years ago, I promised myself to stop doing that, and I have been much happier since then. If you are yourself a person prone to happiness, cleverness, or humor, you might also want to focus on finding playmates and not on pleasing the frightened or resentful people you are bound to meet.

The advantages of some

“Radical feminism argues that the source of women’s oppression is a patriarchal society. [Patriarchy’s] fundamental premise is the oppression of women [and its] positions of power and authority … are generally reserved exclusively for men.”

You wouldn’t believe the crap I have to read just to make it through my week. I know, I know—women have had to read demoralizing crap for centuries. As if that helps. No, I don’t see how it helps anyone except the professional haters to view the world as men versus women.

And just to be clear: I have nothing against women. Some of my best friends are women. I was raised by a woman. I dated a woman in college.

My point is that many people gain political power and money by drumming up fear and anger, and the best way to drum up fear and anger is to refer to categories of people as if they are all the same. On top of the effort to paint life as a war between men and women, the quotation raises questions about what can possibly be meant by “generally reserved exclusively.” If power is reserved generally for men, that means some women have power; if power is reserved exclusively for men, that means no women have power. And that’s the problem: the conflation of the general and the particular.

There’s a simple cure. Just insert the word, some, into propositions about people. This produces, with the example above, “the source of some women’s oppression is a patriarchal society,” which is still debatable but at least not intrinsically offensive.

Another problem with construing the society as a battle between men and women is that it ignores the fact that the vast majority of men were raised by women. Supposedly, women are made (by men) to hate themselves and to perpetuate sexism, but that’s a perspective that itself defines women as impotent. Conflicts between societies, religions, and tribes can sensibly be viewed either as co-constructed or as a clash of agendas, depending on whether you think, say, the Israelis and the Palestinians are in a system together or in a clash of systems. But surely within a tribe, conflicts between the sexes can only be construed as systemic, as co-constructed. It’s as hard to be a decent man in a patriarchal society as it is to be a decent women (the recent movie, A Separation, set in Iran, is about that very difficulty).

So insist on “some.” When they tell you white people are privileged, ask them to say some white people, on some occasions. When they tell you black people voted overwhelmingly for Obama because he wants to give them stuff, ask them to say some black people. Once the exceptions are noted, they’ll be forced to attach a specific percentage to their generalizations, and their utter lack of data will become clear.

The Happiness Cost of Racism

A recent headline claimed that “Whites Believe They Are Victims of Racism More Often Than Blacks” at http://now.tufts.edu/news-releases/whites-believe-they-are-victims-racism-more-o). I didn’t bother to read the study itself since so many published studies are simply wrong, but the article states that the study authors “asked a nation-wide sample of 208 blacks and 209 whites to indicate the extent to which they felt blacks and whites were the targets of discrimination in each decade from the 1950s to the 2000s. A scale of 1 to 10 was used, with 1 being ‘not at all’ and 10 being ‘very much.’”

Well, just look at the methodology, and you can see why the evaluation of racism in the 2000s, after first priming subjects to think of racism in the 1950s, will seem better for blacks and worse for whites. So the study doesn’t tell us what people really think. What interests me, though, are other ways that context can affect our thinking about racism.

If you are white and expect that you will not be put into your skin in a way that makes you self-conscious, because it rarely happens to you, then any instance of it happening to you will stand out, and you may overestimate the degree of racism in your life. Also, when the news of the day is that colleges discriminate against white applicants and the 1965 Voting Rights Act is unconstitutionally forceful in protecting the rights of black voters (these are upcoming Supreme Court cases), then the availability heuristic—we overemphasize whatever comes to mind—is likely to make you think that there is a lot of anti-white racism.

If you are black and have been forewarned by your family about the ubiquity of racism in America, then you are likely to be struck by the many instances of not encountering it, and you are likely to underestimate the anti-black racism in America. Also, even though your friends tell each other stories of racism, many mainstream news and entertainment outlets don’t. (“’Man bites dog’ is news.”)

My own view is that whites and blacks in America have about the same number of racist moments, but that the cost for blacks is much greater. Most people self-select for situations where they are not constantly put in their skin, either by looking for (or staying stuck in) social networks and neighborhoods and jobs where they are not stigmatized, or by making places more comfortable with them just by being there and behaving well. So most people lead lives that do not produce racist encounters. But the places that blacks have to avoid to avoid racism are more potentially valuable to them than are the places to whites that whites avoid to avoid racism. This is partly because white-oriented places are richer and are paths to wealth, but it is also because there are just a lot more white-oriented places in America than black-oriented or neutral places. In that sentence, I mean by “white-oriented” a place where you don’t stand out if you’re white, but you do stand out if you’re black. The odds of finding the best college, job, friends, romantic partner, or entertainment for yourself are greater if there are more places you can look.

In a completely racist marital market, for example, with 10% blacks and 90% whites (I’m oversimplifying) in a city of 200,000 people, a young black woman might find that of the 10,000 black men in the city, a thousand of them are in her age bracket and 500 of them are single. A young white woman is looking at 4500 prospects. The white woman is 9 times more likely than the black woman to find a man who matches her desired profile of traits. If they’re lesbians, they’re even worse off. If race is not a barrier, both straight women are looking at 5000 prospects. In this example, the straight black woman still gets married but only because the black man she marries also has to settle. My point is that just by being the majority, financial opportunities aside, anti-black racism is more costly than anti-white racism when cost involves happiness.

Abusive relationship

Dear Dr. Reality,

I just don’t understand. I grew up with an incredibly supportive father, a semi-nurturing (somewhat verbally volatile but also loving) mother. Things weren’t perfect, my father definitely enabled my mother’s selfishness and my mother took advantage of his kindness. Though this resulted in some consequences within our family dynamic, we were also loving, supportive of one another, and generally happy.

How is it that I became involved in a emotionally abusive and ultimately physically abusive relationship? This person controlled me for several years (I was often afraid to go out with friends, to not answer his phone calls, to not do what he told me to do). Then, when I finally (thank god) caught him cheating on me, I finally was able to break up with him. After not talking to him for three months, I started it up again. Subsequently, he became jealous and flipped. He became violent, he grabbed my wrist to the point of bruising, dumped water on my head, whipped me with hangers, held me down by my neck.

How does someone like me forgive this so easily? How can I still talk to him on a daily basis, tell him I love him, be anxious if I miss his calls?

I’m not dumb, uneducated, ugly, desperate for a relationship, etc. Why can’t I stop talking to him? Yes, I love him. Yes, I worry about him. Yes, I crave his support. But still, what am I doing?

Sincerely,

how-does-this-happen?

Dear How Does This Happen,

With all due respect, and I mean that, “how does this happen” is the wrong question. The right questions are whether all things considered you are glad you are with him, whether there is a way to make things better, and, if the answers to those questions are in the negative, why you stay. I’m not sure whether you want to be in an “emotionally abusive” and physically abusive relationship. There’s pretty strong evidence in your letter that you do: you may not have known what you were in for when you met him, but you certainly did when you re-upped. Also, there’s a subtle way you downplay his violence (by pairing “whipped me with hangers” with “dumped water on my head”). I imagine many people, including your saner self, would react with horror and try to push you out of the relationship. This allows you to export the negatives about the relationship and to defend it. When other people, including you, shout that you should leave, it makes you think, it’s not that bad. So I refrain.

Perhaps you feel so guilty about sex that you can only enjoy it if you are being punished for it at the same time? It’s just a guess, but it fits the data.

When you say your father was “incredibly” supportive, methinks the lady doth protest too much. Maybe you’re really angry at him and you’ve paired up with someone you feel less guilty about getting angry at and protect your father from your anger by idealizing him. Maybe you got the idea that an incredibly supportive father needs a daughter in trouble so he can stay incredibly supportive. Again, these are just guesses.

The only way to tell if the relationship can be improved is to start acting like the kind of girlfriend you want to be, instead of like an abuse victim, and see if he can respond in kind. Explicit rules can help about what is and is not allowed, but the rules have to be enforced.

You say you aren’t dumb, uneducated, ugly, or desperate. I doubt, in your heart of hearts, that you really believe you are particularly appealing. It sounds to me that in your heart of hearts you believe you’re a slut (this would explain why you tolerate being treated like a slut—monitored, pushed around, and only really aggravated by his cheating). Are you a slut? If not, stop treating yourself like one; if so, stop being one, or stop complaining about it; these all require close relationships with people who think you’re not a slut to bolster your sense that you’re not one. One way to find out what you really think of yourself and also to find out whether that self-image is correct is to enter a relationship where everything possible is done to allow you to know yourself. That’s called psychotherapy when it’s done right.

Finally, I want to say that if you substitute the word, meth, or cocaine, for his name in your thoughts, it might help clarify things.

I hope you find your way.

Dr. Reality

Holiday Stress

Dear Dr. Reality,

My husband never does enough for the holidays. It’s like he doesn’t care. He knows how upset this makes me, but for Valentine’s Day, he’ll just pick up flowers and candy on the way home. Last V-Day, he didn’t even do that! Halloween is approaching and he hasn’t said a word about our costumes (we’re going to a party). It seems like we always have a fight, but he never changes.

Signed, All Dressed Up and No One to Go With

Dear All Dressed Up,

When you try to control your spouse by exploding with anger or tears when he disappoints you, you become like a valley filled with landmines. In a landscape like that, expect cautious, small steps, and a lot of anxiety that interferes with thinking about other people (that is, about you). When you try to control your spouse by acting like a drill sergeant, you will get a mask of compliance (“Yes, dear”) and find that he is reserving his joy for other situations. It’s fine to want to control your spouse; it’s monstrous to attempt it. One of the few things we know for certain in psychology is that aversive control never produces actual control but only the mask of obedience; it also produces anxiety and stress. My advice is to dig up all your landmines and replant them around the perimeter—only get angry if your partner violates a basic boundary of the relationship. Otherwise, enjoy the fact that he is not a slave to other people’s expectations, even yours. Try to make coming home, even on a holiday, something he looks forward to doing. If you’re feeling unappreciated or uncelebrated, talk about it with him. But don’t turn into Nero, singing for people who were afraid of him and demanding applause. And don’t turn into my grandmother, who responded to occasional letters with remonstrations about not having written longer and more frequent letters. Instead, find out what he likes about you and do more of that. And if he is moved to reciprocate, don’t become one of those nieces who ignores Uncle Harry and just wants to know what he brought her.

Dr. Reality

Was Jesus a bully?

Jesus, like many of my heroes, was seriously flawed.

(It is not my intention to offend anyone. Really. But as you know from my prior posts, I think free speech is more important than tiptoe-ing around people’s religious anger. And I do have a point I want to make about doubt and sin, and their relationship to multiculturalism. I read the Bible regularly with absolutely no religious training.)

I can’t accept Jesus as divine. I’m always ready to forgive some flaws in historical characters, because it isn’t fair to judge them out of temporal context. A man may be forgiven for owning slaves at a time when it was customary, but God would have known better than to condone slavery. God would have known something about the benefits of the free enterprise system, the equality of women in all matters, and germs.

I admire Jesus’ use of analogy and his concern for the marginalized. I also admire, above all else, his admonition to remove the log from my own eye before trying to help others with their specks. This is the cornerstone of my approach to psychotherapy, marriage, parenting, and friendship.

Now, it’s quite possible that everything I dislike about Jesus was something tacked on to him by the gospel writers. Since there are no other sources of information about Jesus the man, all we have is what the gospel writers provided. I suppose I would like to think him perfect, and blame all his flaws on them. But it’s impossible to distinguish what reflects the man himself and what reflects the writers’ varying agendas. They, after all, were trying to start a religion, so they may have been primarily responsible for what, in my reading of the gospels, sounds like a lot of bullying. On the other hand, Jesus’ worst attributes, to me, sound like those of the bullying preachers of contemporary America, so I have to consider the possibility that he was one of those sorts of preachers: a lot of good ideas mixed in with obsessive concern about whether you believe in him.

Like some contemporary preachers, he says terrible things about anyone who doesn’t believe in him, demanding not only obedience but a kind of totalitarian thought-control (if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out!!—please; everyone would be blind). I prefer the morality implied by my unprepared reading of the Ten Commandments. By saying not to commit adultery, I think the Bible implicitly condones the occasional glance and the prurient fantasy. By saying not to kill, I think the Bible implicitly condones anger.

So I don’t know whether I am calling Jesus a bully or the gospel writers, but he comes across to me as the sort of bully who forces you to say nice things about him under threats. When a bully of that sort is really determined, like a batterer or child abuser, the best strategy is to genuinely believe the nice things you must say about him to protect yourself from expressing skepticism and getting a beating.

People at sporting events hold up signs that say John 3:16, which I think may be the single most despicable verse in the Bible. It says, in effect, that to get eternal life, all you have to do is believe. It says, in effect, that you have to choose between going to Heaven with Hitler and going to Hell with Gandhi. Who in good conscience could choose the former?

In Luke, Jesus tells the parable of the lord who goes off to Rome to get his kingship papers and leaves money with his slaves to invest. Jesus means that he himself is the lord, soon to depart, and the slaves are the people who can get him a return on the investment he has made in his ministry. The slaves who make money for the lord are rewarded. One slave, however, tells the lord that he did not invest the money. “I wrapped it up in a piece of cloth, for I was afraid of you, because you are a harsh man; you take what you did not deposit, and reap what you did not sow.” This is as fine a dressing down of slave-owners as you could hope to find. But in the parable, it is the outspoken slave who is punished, not the cruel master. The lord adds, “As for these enemies of mine who did not want me to be king over them, bring them here and slaughter them in my presence.”

The Bible, like all history, is replete with stories of kings who solidified their power by murdering everyone who questioned, or might question, their authority (though none that I can think of besides Jesus who take so much glee in the murders as to insist on witnessing them). You’d think that if the Christians were to draw any conclusion at all from his crucifixion, it would be that we shouldn’t punish, much less kill, people for their religious beliefs. But Luke’s Jesus is just as bloodthirsty as the Pharisees (who, after all, sought Jesus’ death for the same crime—blasphemy—that Jesus condones killing and torturing for). The master of analogic thinking somehow failed to appreciate the analogy between his heresy toward his own religion and the doubt of those who don’t believe in him.

Why am I writing about Jesus in a multicultural blog? His attitude toward the marginalized is at times inspiring. Sinners, especially, are well treated. But then he creates whole new classes of marginalization that are treated from badly to horribly. In Matthew, this includes gentiles; in John, it includes Jews. Throughout, it includes nonbelievers. I want to face my doubt, and my sins, and other people’s doubt about what’s important to me with the same acceptance I have when I face the sins of the people I love. Jesus is a lovely model of the latter, but not the former.

Analogy 1

Understanding analogy is the single most important issue in multiculturalism and in psychotherapy. It’s what enables the Christian to understand that the Muslim feels about burning the Koran the way the Christian would feel about burning the Bible. It’s more than empathy; empathy allows the Christian to see that the Muslim is upset, just as the Christian would be upset if he lost something to which he was attached but which was ultimately false. Empathy analogizes the Koran to the Christian’s attachment to false beliefs. Analogy is needed to fully grasp the significance of burning the Koran. It’s what allows the privileged to understand the marginalized. It’s what allows the therapist to understand that the way the patient approaches the hierarchy in therapy is like the way she approaches other internal and external hierarchies.

A strange thing about analogy is that once you use it, the thing you analogize loses its quality of a sacred cow. For a thing to be sacred, it must be literal, and to be literal, it must be understood in a fundamental frame, a context that cannot be transliterated. If you say that the thing that matters most to you is combatting racism, say, you can proceed with zealotry. But as soon as you think that combatting racism is like welcoming people who at first seem intolerable and that this in turn is like welcoming racists, your zeal is deflected.

Similarly, once you analogize yourself to other people, you lose certainty about who you are. Instead of defining yourself as virtuous and valorous, you have to see yourself as a bundle of complex agendas. This can bring peace and freedom, which is why people pursue it in spiritual practice, psychotherapy, and elsewhere, but it can also bring confusion, which is why people resist it. Part of the appeal of turning clinical psychology into a healthcare profession, besides the fact that it’s where they keep the money, is that it allows people to treat depression, anxiety, and disappointment as literal conditions that leave intact their personas and self-definitions.

Jesus is one of my heroes because of his concern for the marginalized and his appreciation of analogy, which he called parable (from a Greek word that means comparison or analogy). That all speech is metaphoric is hinted at by the fact that the word, talk, comes from tale; the Spanish word for talking, hablar, comes from fable; and the French word for talking, parler, comes from parable. Jesus said two things about analogy that you might want to keep in mind. In Matthew 3:10, he explains to his disciples that he teaches in parables because to those who understand them, “it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven,” but to those who do not understand them, “it has not been given.” Thus is analogic thinking a sifting of people, as he discusses in the same chapter. Then, when the disciples still don’t get it, after a parable about leavening, he tells them, in Matthew 16:11, “How could you fail to perceive that I was not speaking about bread?” (New Revised Standard Version.) Are we willing to sacrifice our certainty and self-righteousness to get to heaven? (For God’s sake, don’t tell me I have to specify that “heaven” in that sentence is a metaphor.)

Size-ism 1

Recently, an overweight Wisconsin television newswoman denounced a “bully” who had written her an email telling her she should model a healthier lifestyle for young female viewers. A colleague of hers posted the email on Facebook to rally her defense. On television, her peroration went as follows: “To all of the children out there who feel lost, who are struggling with your weight, with the color of your skin, your sexual preference, your disability, even the acne on your face, listen to me right now, do not let your self-worth be defined by bullies.”

I’m not sure how I feel about fat people. I definitely don’t think they should be bullied, but I don’t accept the analogies to those other targets of bullying. It’s true that I’m grateful that my own vices aren’t covered by the law of conservation of energy and don’t show on my face. But if you say it’s not people’s fault that they eat more than they need, don’t you have to say that it’s not the bullies’ fault that they bully?

There are a lot of reasons why some people consume more calories than they burn, and it’s hard not to look at fat people through the lens of my own desire for food. If I didn’t care what other people thought of me, I’d weigh at least a hundred pounds more than I do now. It took me a long time to realize, then, that not all fat people lack impulse control and express disdain for others (which is what it would mean if I got fat). In fact, rather than congratulate myself for caring what others think of me, I could as easily condemn myself for vanity. Fat people aren’t vain about their figures.

I don’t have negative thoughts about fat people, but I prefer to look at slim people. I dislike slow walkers quite a bit (unless they’re old or infirm), and I’ve noticed a correlation with weight. When I get on an airplane, I hope the person in the next seat isn’t encroaching on mine, but I’ve had worse luck with men on this score than with fat people (or am I supposed to say, “people with fat”?). Some men will take up the whole armrest and spread their knees into my space. (I am an alpha dog only verbally.) I prefer it when fat people wear loose clothing for general aesthetic reasons, but it doesn’t irritate me like slow walking because I don’t have to look at anything I find aversive.

Anyway, back to the overweight newswoman. Why did her friend publish the email? To me, it seemed like her buddies gathered around her for support and dumped on whoever wrote the email. Myself, I wondered what the man who wrote it was so upset about. Probably hating himself and trying to feel superior, maybe even feeling as if he was not suitable for the company of children, since that what he accused the newswoman of. I get the argument that the denunciation is supposed to make fat kids feel better about standing up to bullies and to make potential bullies back off and see the error of their ways, but there’s something about the publication of the email that seems opportunistic, a chance to vent anger at people who notice how other people look. It struck me as more than standing up to a bully. When she reads the email on air, she pronounces the word, obesity, as if it’s a racial slur. And yet, that is the word for her condition, as she herself acknowledges. I don’t suppose it’s good manners to comment on other people’s bodies, generally, but when they put themselves on television, aren’t viewers authorized to notice what they look like?

Another possible response to bullying is to stand up to it without fighting back, to acknowledge that we all do it, to ourselves, to others, for whatever otherness or weakness we condemn in ourselves that we see in others. Responding in kind with denunciations makes us feel better but gets us nowhere. I’m pretty sure this is what Jesus was talking about when he said to turn the other cheek and not cast stones.