It Gets Better, But Sometimes It Gets Worse Before It Gets Better
I remember having a conversation once with a colleague at work, about the endless conflict in the Middle East. At one point he said, “don’t you think things would be a whole lot easier if Israel just didn’t exist?”
I wasn’t entirely sure how to answer that. On one level the answer is, of course, “yes.” Things would be a whole lot easier for a whole lot of people if Israel didn’t exist. Israel is an exceptionally inconvenient country.
On the other hand, this isn’t generally considered an acceptable way to talk. If you said to your wife, “things would be a whole lot easier if your mother didn’t exist,” well, that might be true on some level. But you should still expect to get slapped for saying it.
So the answer I gave him was, basically, “yes, I suppose there are all sorts of people all over the world of whom one might say: it would be more convenient if they didn’t exist.”
This is really Andrew Sullivan’s beat rather than mine (and while I don’t think he’s already written about this story, it’s hard to keep up with Andrew, so I may well be wrong), but the following piece from the Jewish Week, by Rabbi Steven Greenberg, made me think of that work conversation:
This past spring, my partner and I moved to Cincinnati. Soon after we arrived, an Orthodox synagogue in town prohibited our attendance. The rabbi of the shul called apologetically to inform us that the ruling had come from a rabbi whose authority exceeded his own. I decided to call this rabbi, who is the head of a prominent yeshiva and a respected halachic authority. I wanted to meet him personally to discuss the decision with him. He agreed to speak with me on the phone.
He said that he had heard that I advocated changing the Torah. I told him that this is not true, that in fact I am trying to find a way for people who are gay or lesbian to still be a part of Orthodox communities. I shared with him that people who are gay and lesbian who want to remain true to the Torah are in a great deal of pain. Many have just left the community. Some young gay people become so desperate they attempt suicide.
His reply: “Maybe it’s a mitzvah for them to do so.”
At first I was speechless. I asked for clarification, and yes, this is exactly what he meant. Since gay people are guilty of capital crimes, perhaps it might be a good idea for them to do the job themselves. For the rest of the conversation I was shaking, using every ounce of my strength to end the conversation without losing my composure.
His uncensored expression, one he might wish he hadn’t said, was surely beyond the pale in every in every way, even for the strictest of Orthodox rabbis. But in retrospect I am grateful to him for this transparent, if painful, honesty. Whether it is said so baldly or not, for many in the Orthodox community it would be better for us to disappear, one way or another.
Rabbi Greenberg goes on to make the case that, in terms of Jewish law as well as basic ethics, it’s more important to save the life of a suicidal gay teen even if it means seeming to suggest that homosexual behavior is not a grave transgression, and therefore it is incumbent on Orthodox Jewish rabbis and institutions to publicly condemn bullying and humiliation of gay people, particularly gay youth. Rabbi Greenberg himself is fighting for considerably more recognition than this minimal level; he does want to argue that traditional understandings of the biblical prohibitions are incorrect, and that there is a way for a person to live a healthy and full gay life as well as a healthy and full religiously-observant one. But at a minimum, he wants that recognition of a right to exist.
He’s not going to get it.
It gets worse before it gets better – indeed, it gets worse even as it’s getting better. That’s the way the politics of these sorts of issues goes, issues that appear to present very fundamental challenges to an entire worldview. At the outset, the worldview has a variety of sources of support: longstanding traditions and patterns of behavior; a larger societal consensus on the rightness of a position; the support of scientific authorities; etc. But as these supports fall away, as patterns of behavior change, as the question becomes contested rather than settled, as the scientific consensus dissolves or even switches to the other side, the defender of the traditional understanding is left with only one actual argument: if I give this up, I will have surrendered everything. And so I will never give up.
This isn’t even a specifically religious phenomenon, something I think Andrew is reluctant to recognize. The pieds noirs grew more radical even as their political position grew untenable as they were abandoned by Paris. Ditto for Rhodesia. Ditto for defenses of segregation in the American South. The challenge of homosexuality is distinct in that gay people appear everywhere, in all kinds of families – the solution of separatism is not a viable one. But otherwise, it’s a pretty familiar dynamic. And we’ve probably got a decent idea of how that dynamic will play out:
It’ll get worse before it gets better. Indeed, it’ll get worse even as it gets better, even because it gets better.
“It’ll get worse before it gets better.”
Just curious Noah, for the pied noirs and the whites who used to live in Rhodesia (or those few who still remain) — when will it get better?!
I can’t speak for the Orthodox position, but it seems to me the Catholic position is the way to go — love the sinner but hate the sin. I know this position will never make Andrew or the gay lobby happy, but at least the Church will always condemn “bullying and humiliation”:
“men and women with homosexual tendencies “must be accepted with respect, compassion and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided” [CONSIDERATIONS REGARDING PROPOSALS TO GIVE LEGAL RECOGNITION TO UNIONS BETWEEN HOMOSEXUAL PERSONS]
— Arminius · Oct 15, 02:00 AM · #
Kind of a Whiggish view of history on display here, don’t you think? What exactly do you mean by “get better,” and how are we to have confidence that “getting worse” is a sign of its eminence?
According to that logic, surely we’re on the cusp of a lot of great things happening! Al Qaeda is the harbinger of a renaissance of Islamic toleration. Russia is about to have a baby boom and a wave of teetotalism. America’s debt and overspending problems are nearly over.
As the Demotivator poster says, “It’s always darkest just before it goes pitch black.”
— Ethan C. · Oct 15, 05:10 AM · #
Arminius, that’s a pretty weak analogy. The pieds noirs and white Rhodesians lived in colonial systems that were explicitly racist and systematically unjust; they got to live on top of that system, with the locals serving them as cheap labor. Noah’s point is that, as the system gradually collapsed, most of them clung ever more fiercely to it. Your point seems to be that, after the system collapsed, they became abused victims under the new, differently-but-equally unjust system that replaced it.
That doesn’t remotely map to Noah’s point. (Unless you think that gay marriage will lead to brutally oppressive Gay Domination of the 90+% of us who aren’t gay.)
Ethan C., that makes no sense. Just because things get worse before getting better, doesn’t mean they can’t get worse /without/ getting better.
Doug M.
— Doug M. · Oct 15, 07:39 AM · #
Doug M.,
No analogy intended — the question is direct and honest — however you want to characterize the system that the pied noirs and white Rhodesians lived under, it is an objective fact that their lives (for the most part) are not better*. So as Ethan C. suggests, the question of who wins and loses depends on who is telling the tell.
*Of course, one could also argue that life got objectively worse for everyone living in those countries, so my question could also be — when will it get better for Algerians and Rhodesians, all in?
— Arminius · Oct 15, 02:11 PM · #
Doug M.,
No analogy intended — the question is direct and honest — however you want to characterize the system that the pied noirs and white Rhodesians lived under, it is an objective fact that their lives (for the most part) are not better*. So as Ethan C. suggests, the question of who wins and loses depends on who is telling the tale.
*Of course, one could also argue that life got objectively worse for everyone living in those countries, so my question could also be — when will it get better for Algerians and Rhodesians, all in?
— Arminius · Oct 15, 02:12 PM · #
Arminius,
Nick Price reached number one in the world, and that was after Zimbabwean independence. So mate, not only did things get better, they got best!
(By the way, why waste your worries about the dangers of race-mixing in this post? If you want to catch up with your Finchy, Steve, he’s hanging out at Millman’s other post— which inexplicably links to Sailer’s unfocused, poorly-written journal entry-as-movie review— about The Social Network.)
— Pat Bateman · Oct 15, 03:51 PM · #
Pat,
I’ve never been a big fan of golf…but what makes you think I’m worried about race-mixing?! I happen to be a big fan:
http://www.google.com/images?hl=en&q=halle+berry&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=univ&ei=hoS4TImcLc6jngfVkJ3HDQ&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ct=title&resnum=1&ved=0CD4QsAQwAA
— Arminius · Oct 15, 04:45 PM · #
This, in its way, is eliminationist rhetoric, just from the other side.
— Third Rails · Oct 15, 08:18 PM · #
(Unless you think that gay marriage will lead to brutally oppressive Gay Domination of the 90+% of us who aren’t gay.)
Probably not brutal, but it’s already leading to discrimination against religious groups that can’t conscientiously accept or support homosexual relationships.
But that’s really beside my point. My viewpoint here really has nothing to do with whether I support or oppose the normalization of homosexuality.
I was saying that it’s naive to take a sign of increased opposition, or “increasingly irrational” opposition to any social movement as a sign of the impending success of that movement. If that were the case, then the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the late 1860’s would have signaled the impending bloom of full equal rights for African Americans. And the U.S. would have won the Vietnam War in 1969.
— Ethan C. · Oct 15, 10:49 PM · #
The KKK in the 1860s example actually supports Noah’s point.
Blacks were freed = things got better. Rise of KKK = things got worse. Things got worse even as things got better, indeed because things got better. That said, I’m agnostic re Noah’s argument. I just wanted to score some Friday Night debating points before I go out drinking and chasing.
— Kristoffer V. Sargent · Oct 16, 01:20 AM · #
“Things got worse even as things got better, indeed because things got better.”
That seems to me to be the inversion of Noah’s point. He takes an increase in chaos and opposition to be a leading indicator of moral development, not as a trailing indicator of previous progress.
And how much better off, exactly, were the black sharecroppers of the 1880’s than the slaves of the 1840’s? Really enough better for the Klan to be an example heralding true moral progress? Was Jim Crow and lynching really progress, on balance, over overt enslavement?
But what I really mind is the idea of privileging the “things getting better” part of the supposed dialectic. It wasn’t better for the populations that suffered directly under the “things getting worse” behavior.
One might say that in the 20th century, things got better as democracy overcame authoritarianism, but things got temporarily worse in Germany and Russia due to the upheaval, as the ideal of top-down state authority became progressively more irrational and indefensible. Somehow, I don’t think that would have made many of those regimes’ victims feel any better.
And yes, I realize Godwin’s Law has just come into effect. Such is the nature of a late Friday night blog discussion.
— Ethan C. · Oct 16, 04:46 AM · #
Ethan C.: “Was Jim Crow and lynching really progress, on balance, over overt enslavement?”
YES.
How much of an improvement it was is up for debate, but the fact that African Americans were recognized as persons (without masters and with at least some rights) and not property (with masters and without any rights), made a huge difference, not just in their treatment, but in their position in society as well as their self-image.
— Marko · Oct 16, 05:04 AM · #
It seems to me that far too much time and energy is spent trying to reconcile ancient, irrelevant fairy tales with the realities of life in the 21st century. When your SELF comes into conflict with your “faith” or another’s, choose yourSELF. Very nice to want orthodox this or that to accept you… but life is too short. And really, what’s the point? The best advice is Groucho Marx’s “I’d never belong to a club that would not have me as a member.”
— Steve Rosenberger · Oct 16, 05:59 AM · #
“How much of an improvement it was is up for debate…”
That’s my point. How much better does it have to be to support a “gets worse as it’s really getting better” narrative rather than a “gets better as it’s really getting worse” narrative?
My contention is that Noah’s post represents a Whiggish viewpoint that presupposes that social developments are fundamentally “good” and “progressive”, and that any increases in suffering along the way are incidental.
Leaving aside whether the goal of homosexual equality is desirable, I think this is a rather heartless way of addressing the damage caused by social upheaval. We can’t just trust that the results of a revolutionary process will be good enough to justify the suffering within the process itself. Even if we believe in the goals of the revolution, we ought to focus on relieving the damage caused by the change.
Assuming that long-term “progress” will make up for short-term harms is a classic error in liberalism.
— Ethan C. · Oct 16, 03:50 PM · #
Arminius,
The problem with “Love the sinner; hate the sin.” is that it forces gay teenagers, even virgins, to wear a scarlet letter for the rest of their lives. If they deeply believe in the Catholic faith, they will adopt the role that the letter implies.
It they read what the patristic authors have to say about homosexuality, they will certainly read Chrysostom’s sermon against the sodomites which says that homosexuals are worse than murderers because while the murderer kills the body, the homosexual kills the soul within the body (the homosexual causes the damnation of the one he loves.) Like the rabbi mentioned above, Chrysostom also claimed that homosexuals are better off dead.
It the young gay man believes this filth (as I once did), he will be at his greatest danger of suicide when he finds even a friend who loves him and whom he loves.
The Catholic ethic in dealing with gays is an atrocity because the more closely the young gay man or woman follows it, the more likely it is to lead to suicide.
Is this what the Church wants? I believe it is. Once the Church libeled Jews saying they kill Christian children during Passover.
Today the Pope libels gays as destroyers of humanity and the corrupters of children. He commits his libel at Christmas rather than Good Friday, but the results are the same, murder, torture, and suicide.
— Frank · Oct 16, 03:58 PM · #
Bravo Frank. Could not have said it better. However, some may very well say; Love the church, hate the pedophiles and their protectors including Pope Ratzi.
In the end things do get much better as soon as you reject the dehumanizing anti gay arguments as empty ones and start rejoicing in the person god intended you to be…gay.
— Paul · Oct 16, 04:42 PM · #
I have no dog in this fight, but I would say you have his position backwards. It’s not that chaos equals or signals moral progress, but that moral progress is often revolutionary. Now that I think about it, his point can be operationalized by way of living systems theory. The shitty old order is the initial basin of supervening structure, then human contingency creates a socio-moral pressure which amplifies from a smattering of localized disturbances into an bond-shattering eruption, escape velocity is reached and the system crosses into thermodynamic criticality.
Subcomponents which were previously nested and ordered dissolve; members ionize and bond with other members into new networks with new logics. Some of these networks might act to amplify heat, prolonging the criticality. Ultimately, however, the heat dissipates and the system settles down into orbit around another attractor. A new phase emerges, and new structures solidify. Again and again, forever and ever.
Uh, so yeah, Noah’s point is functionally sound.
— Kristoffer V.Sargent · Oct 16, 06:37 PM · #
Oh how I love that Catholic “love the sinner, hate the sin”. Let’s see how that runs: love you, hate the fact that you’re Jewish; love you, hate the fact that you’re black; love you, hate how you are … Actually, no, that is not love, that is belittling condescension passing itself off as “love”.
How making a 13,14,15,16-year-old think they are against God and “outside nature”, that they are “objectively disordered”, that they re “oriented towards an intrinsic evil”, because they are part of the human sexual diversity which is clearly an inherent part of human nature counts as “decent” or “Godly” is revealing in itself.
Noah’s point is completely sound, as anyone who has studied the history of Jewish emancipation realises. The closer Jews got to legal and social equality, the more frenzied Jew-hatred became. Indeed, if one wants to understand the C18th and C19th debates over Jewish emancipation, just think of contemporary debates over queer (i.e. all those who do not fit into simple sex=gender assumptions) emancipation, substitute “homosexual” for “Jew” and almost all the patterns repeat — including the accusations laid against the “damage” that would be done allowing the Jews/homosexuals legal equality, that it is an affront to people’s religious conscience, the accusations being made against a small minority (that they are against God, that they have betrayed their God-given nature/role, that they are engaged in a conspiracy against Christianity, that they corrupt everything they touch or are incorporated into, that they prey on children, that it is an offense against basic principles of the civilisation, that “science” proves their twisted nature) and so on.
That, even now, some Jews have not learnt how deadly the notion that some minority “deserves” extermination is just demonstrates how the deadly notion that people are not “real people”, not legitimate manifestations of human, is to understanding and moral decency.
— Lorenzo from Oz · Oct 17, 01:11 AM · #
It may be just my fascination with mental pathologies, but how does one get from hate the sin to hate the fact that you are jewish or black? (i am not catholic, but I accept hate the sin, love the sinner as an excellent guideline)
— The reticulator · Oct 17, 02:03 PM · #
Frank,
No one who is gay has to wear any letters, scarlet or otherwise, the church just doesn’t want people to commit sins. It’s that simple. Your analogy makes no sense (or at least I don’t get it).
I’d be interested to read the entire Chrysostom sermon — it is entirely possible that he might have “homosexuals are better off dead” — but based on your later characterization of the Pope’s words, it wouldn’t surprise me if you are distorting his meaning. And just to be clear, if you can provide a link to everyone directing us to the Pope’s writing or speech in which he “libels gays as destroyers of humanity and the corrupters of children” I would be very interested.
Lorenzo,
You also seem to have a problem with analogies. You seem to think that someone’s desires are the only thing that define that person as a human being. I beg to differ. The rest of your comment is just gibberish (e.g. Jew hatred existed in Europe and the Middle East whether Jews were close to “legal and social equality” or not) with the exception of the part that seems to be slanderous — no one is suggesting that anyone deserves exterminiation or that anyone isn’t real. As a believing Catholic, I think everyone is created in the image of God and is infinitely precious.
— Arminius · Oct 18, 02:03 AM · #
Kristoffer,
It’s nice to know that Noah’s point can be rephrased with huge scientific-sounding words. That must mean it’s true!
— Ethan C. · Oct 18, 04:55 PM · #
Hate the sin, love the sinner only works in cases where the “sin” constitutes a bad choice somebody made. In cases involving sexuality, that doesn’t apply; at least, nobody I know of has yet provided a satisfactory account of the “choice” that makes a person gay, straight, or bisexual. When we get into intersexed individuals, the problem gets even harder; when confronted with the moral implications of the existence of people with XY chromosomes who developed as females, or of individuals with both male and female characteristics, traditionalists seem to have to resort to dehumanizing such people by calling them examples of “physical evil” or just “defective”. But how do you dehumanize someone that way and then say you “love the sinner”, how do you claim to regard everyone as “infinitely precious” and then claim that some people’s existence carries moral weight and other peoples’ just doesn’t.
Whatever we think of “hate the sin, love the sinner”, it doesn’t work very well here.
— John Spragge · Oct 18, 07:49 PM · #
John Spragge,
The Catholic Church does not assert that a homosexual *orientation* is sinful — precisely because it is not chosen, as you say. They only claim that homosexual *acts* are sinful. Unless you’re claiming that we cannot have any choice in our sexual acts, then your critique would not seem to apply in this case.
— Ethan C. · Oct 18, 11:43 PM · #
Ethan, the church may claim it doesn’t regard homosexual orientation as sinful, but if disqualifies men from the priesthood based on it, celebrates some people’s commitments and demands that others resign themselves to a lifetime of loneliness. At some point I have to conclude that the church has set up a spiritual hierarchy. To paraphrase Kim Hubbard, it may not actually be a sin to have a same-sex orientation (or be transgendered, or intersexed) in the Roman Catholic church, but it might as well be.
— John Spragge · Oct 19, 12:55 PM · #
John,
The church does not “disqualify” men who are gay from the priesthood. The Vatican document in question is more complicated than you let on:
http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/ccatheduc/documents/rc_con_ccatheduc_doc_20051104_istruzione_en.html
As for celebrating “commitments”, the Church cannot and will not celebrate a commitment to sin. As for a lifetime of loneliness, who says chaste individuals must be lonely? Or that gay men or women can’t find happiness with the opposite sex?
— Arminius · Oct 19, 02:26 PM · #
Seems simple enough to me. The question comes down to a “yes” or a “no”: does the church treat persons with a homosexual orientation they have not acted on as equals of those with a heterosexual orientation. The quoted paragraph makes it clear that the church does not.
In the final analysis, all church doctrines have to pass muster with Jesus’s summary of the Law into just two Mitzvot: love G-d (Deuteronomy 6:5) and love your neighbour as yourself (Leviticus 19:18). I don’t see how you can justify the church’s peculiar demands of persons with a same-sex orientation with love of neighbour, except by some circular logic. But that argument would probably take a long time to work through, so I will just reiterate here: you cannot both set up a moral hierarchy based on characteristic innate to a person and at the same time and in the same context profess to love the sinner but hate the sin.
— John Spragge · Oct 20, 04:08 AM · #
“As for celebrating “commitments”, the Church cannot and will not celebrate a commitment to sin. As for a lifetime of loneliness, who says chaste individuals must be lonely? Or that gay men or women can’t find happiness with the opposite sex?”
And how do you think the heterosexual partners of those gay men and women will feel about it? Are their lives and happiness to be sacrificed for the good of the church?
You are being ridiculous. Essentially you are asking gay men and women to live meaningful lives and “find happiness” by being unauthentic about their fundamental core selves.
This is an absurdity to ask for this. And think of the many people harmed along the way.
— Yeoman Roman · Oct 27, 05:33 AM · #