Stories and mobs

Whenever there is a story in the news and/or social media that is causing a lot of reaction (often vastly different reactions) I tend to avoid it until most people have moved on. I have a gut level distaste for such things, and also I feel like there is too much pressure to take one side or another, and that is something I tend to not want to do, at least not just because a lot of other people are taking sides. (My view on partisan issues: you should be able to deduce what side I am on for yourself. If you can’t, then it isn’t important to our relationship and probably none of your business.)

When I was more active on social media, it was interesting (perhaps in a perverse way) to see how stories went viral and created intensely emotional responses. More negatively, I sometimes felt like I was supposed to react to the issue as well, even if I ordinarily wouldn’t want to. This pressure (or temptation) to “join the party” is another reason I’m very, very glad to have stepped away from social media. I’m sure I’m missing out on a lot of things (so sad….not) but I also am not being entangled in mass outbursts against my better judgment. So far. 

A bit over a year ago, a video of a New York woman called Amy Cooper taken by a man called Christian Cooper was very much in the news. Since I was still on Facebook, I saw a variety of reactions, all of which were antagonistic to Ms Cooper. Women whom you could call my peers, roughly speaking, in age/culture/education, were denouncing Ms Cooper as racist, “Karen,” etc etc. Most bizarrely (to me) there were calls for women to take a sort of collective responsibility for Ms Cooper’s alleged bad behaviour toward Christian Cooper, as if I could be in any way responsible for the actions of a woman I don’t know in a situation I don’t understand. The Amy Cooper story was of course connected with the death of George Floyd and the resulting political action taken by groups and individuals in the USA.

Anyway. Today I took the time to listen to a Kmele Foster/Bari Weiss podcast looking in depth into the Amy Cooper/Christian Cooper story. They look closely at the context of the confrontation and the details of how it was reported. Ms Cooper is interviewed. (Mr Cooper did not respond to the request to participate). It is a disturbing case study of how a video of less than a minute can take on an emotional weight in the minds of strangers who don’t and can’t know the context. And arguably, don’t want to.

I’ve said before that it’s my goal to never be part of a mob in my life. This podcast reinforces that goal in my mind.

The Real Story of the Central Park Karen

With Bari Weiss and Kmele Foster

Part 3 (Rules 7, 8, 9) : Dr Jordan Peterson’s Beyond Order with personal commentary

Preamble: see Part 1 for my explanation of what I’m doing.

About the book: Beyond Order follows JBP’s 2018 book, 12 Rules For Life: An Antidote to Chaos (for a total of 24 rules between both books). Each chapter is devoted to one rule. The chapters may include discussion of self-help ideas, psychological and other scientific research, analysis of literature, popular culture, mythology and/or religion, political and social commentary and anecdotes to build on the theme. This is much like JBP’s speaking style which many know from his popular online lectures and podcasts. Part of the delight and enjoyment is watching thinking and sense making in action. 

Links to other posts in this series (I will make links live as I write and post each blog):

Part 1 (Rules 1, 2, 3)

Part 2 (Rules 2, 3, 4)

Part 3 (Rules 7, 8, 9) you are reading it

Part 4 (Rules 10, 11, 12)

Rule 7: Work as hard as you possibly can on at least one thing and see what happens

This is a rule I have been applying more or less since early adulthood. Sometimes Dr. Peterson is able to put into words ideas that I have intuited or discovered on my own but not made explicit.

In my adolescence, and to some degree in adult life, I experienced the feeling of being "unmoored and adrift." I was/am lucky to have a stable and supportive family, so I was never adrift in all the ways it is possible to be adrift. But there was certainly loneliness, and isolation, and a degree of misery and cynicism. I first experienced it as an isolated teenager trying to complete school by correspondence. I was homeschooled as a child and there were some advantages to that when I was very young, but the advantages had run out by the time I was 12, 13, 14, 15. Out of habit, and fear, I stayed at home....and it was definitely not the right thing to do. My days became increasingly unstructured; I couldn't focus on anything except novels; I procrastinated constantly; I avoided trying anything new or taking any risks. When it became obvious that I might never finish high school with this attitude, my parents made me go back to school. I knew it was necessary at that point too, though I didn't exactly look forward to it and was lacking in many skills. However, in the space of a couple of years I had learned the necessary skills to get by, and within 5 more (university) I had built on them to where I was successful and confident in many ways, though I still had a lot to learn about life.

In university particularly, and since then in what has become my career, I can honestly say I have tried my best and that it has paid off fairly consistently. The good thing about making your best effort, is that regardless whether or not there are financial or social rewards (i.e. external rewards) you are guaranteed to at least learn something from the endeavour, and that usually has long term benefits. It's certainly better than not learning something. There is plenty to critique about my university education for example, but whatever courses I took, I can honestly say I worked very hard on all of them, and didn't make any excuses for myself. This effort mostly insulated me from the cynicism that nearly all my peers had developed by their final year, including (perhaps especially) my top-achieving, elite peers. The intrinsic rewards of hard work that I experienced made the silly games my professors and many fellow students engaged in unappealing. These silly games would re-emerge, a few decades later, as identity politics and critical theory and they are still unappealing.  However, hard work also almost always makes it easier to form happy and productive relationships with other people, regardless of differences.

Rule 8: Try to make one room in your house as beautiful as possible.

"If you learn to make something in your life truly beautiful--even one thing--then you have established a relationship with beauty." What a true and wonderful observation: well worth repeating! And the key word is "relationship." Like any relationship, a one with beauty evolves and needs to be constantly maintained: it is not like you create or find something beautiful and boom, you are set for life.

As a mother of young children, this is particularly (sometimes painfully) true. My children are naturally drawn to beauty, but of course they haven't exactly discovered how to maintain or create it. This means that (adult) decorating is usually a low priority in our house. Beauty is mostly functional right now: it means having an underlying system of order that helps prevent life from exploding around me. It means seeking out novelty in ways other than consumerism, which leads to more stuff to organize and take care of (this is an ongoing challenge for me/us). It means having patience with my daughter's attempts to decorate the house, which don't always line up with my priorities, but which are developmentally appropriate and well-intentioned.

But I still do need to make my spaces beautiful, and the reason is that it is good for my morale (and my family's). Constant tidying and cleaning and maintenance is worthwhile, but also dreary and not very emotionally satisfying. On the other hand, I undertook this summer to beautify our garden in the backyard (with my daughter's help). It is wonderful to now have a space that is actually pretty and fun and a little bit decadent. I wrote about the experience here on my other blog.

Rule 9: If old memories still upset you, write them down carefully and completely 

I chose two texts here because they show the clarity and delightfulness of Dr. Peterson's thinking so well. He connects everyday experience (“plagued by reminisces”) with action (“gather everything from the past that has been avoided”) with morality (the impossibility of avoiding your conscience) with the role of shared stories in culture (“These ideas are encapsulated and represented in the narratives, the fundamental narratives that sit at the base of our culture.”) He engages  the reader at the personal level, acknowledging their daily challenges, puts them in a moral framework, and encourages curiosity about how all of this plays out at the cultural and social level. As a reader struggling with whatever, you are immediately put at the centre of an interesting story, but also challenges to look beyond yourself and whatever dust is collecting in your navel.

I have invested quite a bit of my time and life in reading and writing stories. I’ve studied them formally. However, Jordan Peterson was the first person (other than perhaps Clarissa Estes) to state what seems like it should be obvious: we read other people’s stories, including ancient, shared stories without individual attribution, because life is complicated and it takes too long to figure everything out on your own. We have the resource of our own memories, and the resource of our ancestors’ memories, to the extent that we bother to find them out. There are other reasons to study literature, mythology, religion and other subjects, but that is the central one.