I have been reading Ghosted, a new memoir by Nancy French, and it’s a compelling and incredible story. I’m only at the halfway point, so I haven’t gotten to the actual “ghosting” part, in which the entire Conservative movement declares Nancy and her husband, David, personae non gratae for committing the sin of not supporting Donald Trump. They’re kicked out of the tribe. They no longer fit.
There are pre-echoes of that theme earlier in her story, and one of them really jumped out at me. It occurs when Nancy leaves her rural, southern roots and moves with her husband to New York City. She starts taking classes at NYU, and in a class on feminism, she has this encounter with her fellow students:
After class, she has this thought:
They saw her as someone they needed to change, but they also saw her as someone who didn’t fit—someone who was just…wrong. She couldn’t be a feminist; they already knew what a feminist was. Their definition was right; this person had to be wrong (ah, back to my old friend, the platypus).
The passage jumped out at me because I remembered a friend who had a similar situation back in the early 2000s. She was a curriculum writer on my team. She was an Army wife. She confided in me one day that she felt caught between two worlds. On the base, in her military community, she felt like a liberal outlier compared to the other women she spent time with. Their views sometimes made her uncomfortable, so she tended to keep her opinions to herself to avoid problems (especially during the early days of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars). She was one of them, but she didn’t quite fit in. But now, here at work among predominantly liberal educators, she felt no better. Her lived experience was very different from theirs, and she found that many of her views were now to the right of everyone. And so, once again, she kept her opinions to herself. She had no place where she felt safe to be fully herself. Everyone had their nice little boxes defining what it meant to belong—little houses on the hillside, as the old song goes—and she didn’t quite fit into any of them. And the doors and windows were shut tight.
We humans have a tendency to take the symbol for the thing-symbolized. We pledge allegiance to the flag, but we too often abandon the people who make up “the republic for which it stands.” We invent definitions and distinctions to help us understand the world, but then we forget that the world is what matters, not our definitions and distinctions.
George Orwell says, “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” But what is in front of my nose? Is it just what my five senses are capable of perceiving? I can tell you right now that my senses can be sub-par. I’ve worn glasses most of my life. I know that what my eyes can see is not all there is to be seen, no matter how much I squint. And even if all five senses were firing on all cylinders, I know there’s a lot more out there in the world. A snake can perceive infrared radiation. The images they can see in the dark are “real,” aren’t they, even if none of us can see them?
Okay, maybe that’s too weird. Forget about snakes. Let’s stay with humans. If ten of us took photographs of the same landscape with the same camera, would the pictures be identical? Not likely; we’d frame and light and edit things in our own, individual ways. What Ansel Adams saw at Yosemite was a vision uniquely his. And if we used paint, the results would diverge even more. Whose landscapes are more “real,” Monet’s or Van Gogh’s—or, God help us, Dali’s? Am I supposed to judge which person has the right to say, “this is real,” or even, “I see what I see?” Are any of them truly wrong?
It seems to me that “reality” has to be a composite—a multi-faceted prism rather than a single pane of glass. If we want to understand the reality of the world around us, we need to look through different lenses and listen to different voices. That’s the world we actually share, if we care to know it.
And those different voices…are they unitary within the little boxes we’ve created for them? Is there only one way to be White or Black? One way to be a southerner or a Yankee? One way to be a Conservative or a Liberal? One way to be a feminist? Or a Christian? Or an American? Do we really think each of the boxes we created to help us make sense of the world holds only one example?
I sure acted that way, growing up. As a kid in a liberal, Jewish household in a liberal, Jewish suburb of New York City, I barely understood the breadth and diversity of the Jewish world, much less the Christian one. And life beyond the Northeast? That was about as well defined in my mind as in that famous New Yorker cover:
What did I know of Christians or Conservatives, for example? Nothing. I wrote a paper on Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority for a high school history class, in 1980 or 1981, when his political influence was at its zenith. I did some primitive research on who he was and what he was all about. I’m sure if I read it now, it would reek of self-righteous, teenaged, liberal bias. Why wouldn’t it? What did I know, besides what my parents and their friends said, and what I read in Time magazine?
I’m not saying I was wrong about him, mind you. I’m just saying I didn’t go to a lot of trouble to find out whether I was right—or whether there was any nuance to the picture I was painting.
College and travel and life helped break me out of my bubble a little, and learn how small my childhood world had been. But even then, I traveled in small, concentric circles, spending all of my days with the same kinds of people: theater people and teachers. It took me a long time—far too long—to get over my shyness and introversion and just talk to people outside my circle. Say hello to people at counters or in elevators or on a bus. Engage them in conversation. Listen to them. It took watching an old favorite movie again, “Harold and Maude,” and hearing Maude say, when Harold praises her for being good with people, “Well, they’re my species.”
So simple. So dumb. But that line haunted me for weeks, and it made me want to do better with my species. I’m still working on it.
This Internet thing has helped. I have access to so many people now—people from different upbringings, people with different faith traditions, people with different political convictions. And sure, some of them are bad actors with ugly motives. Some of them are trolls. But most of them—most of the people I’ve encountered online—have been lovely. I’ve read and listened to Progressives far to my left. I’ve read and listed to Conservatives far to my right. I’ve learned from people who talk about religion and family and education and politics in ways I was previously unaware of—people who are funny, thoughtful, sardonic, wise, curmudgeonly…you name it. Interesting. Different from me in a hundred ways. Sometimes they challenge me to rethink my assumptions. Sometimes they help me reinforce my conclusions. Regardless, it has been gratifying to learn from them and to understand—just a little bit—the different and sometimes contradictory ways that people of good faith and good intention see the world.
Not everybody thinks this way, I know. A lot of people don’t feel the need to go past their front yards and get other people’s perspectives, because they already know they disagree. Why waste time listening to people you already know are wrong? It’s exhausting and pointless. Sometimes crazy-making.
Why should it make us angry or crazy to listen to our neighbors talk about the world around them, though? Experiencing variety shouldn’t confer any obligation to approve one part of it or condemn another part. It’s all free samples; no one’s forcing us to buy. And yet, so many of us respond to the offer of the world beyond what we know by saying, “No thanks; I’m good.”
It’s not just about respecting other people’s opinions or being open to changing your mind about something. I think it’s more about taking in the variety and strangeness of the great, wide, world, just for its own sake, because it’s there. It’s about accepting the gift that has been given to us. As Annie Dillard says, “beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.”
I want to be there. I want to be there better—for my friends, for my family, for the handful of people who read this blog and the random things I post on social media. But mostly, I want to be there for me—because it feels like a better life, more capaciously lived.
“Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind,” Emerson says. And I get that. We need to rely on ourselves and trust our own vision. We need to stand up for what we believe. But we also need to be brave enough to see and make room for other people’s visions, provided they’re not Nazis or other monsters. We need to make a safe space for the decent people we meet, and hear them out without instantly judging or dismissing them. Instead of leaping to put them into a box or force them out of a box, we need to find ways to simply embrace them as part of the messy and chaotic reality of the world we live in. After all, they’re our species.
Oh my friend with the big heart and expansive mind and lovely humanity. I don’t have your appetite for all my species right now, but you make a compelling argument. And I love that claymation video. Thank you for thinking beyond the little boxes and perhaps I will try sometime to dip a toe out. But probably not on the internet!