Stepmother Mistresses and Pitiable Bosses: The Importance of Cognitive Dissonance
Solon, an Athenian ruler in the seventh and sixth centuries BCE, is said to have told a story of two brothers, Cleobis and Biton. They were leading what we today might refer to as “the good life”; they had all they needed, and they were hardworking, talented, strong and healthy, and achieving great things. Then, one fateful day, they did their mom a favor. Full of pride, she prayed to a goddess on their behalf — that the goddess might grant her wonderful sons the best thing possible, whatever that might be. After a bit of feasting, they lay down and, out of the blue, died. From a divine perspective, they had reached a pinnacle that couldn’t be surpassed, and so the best thing the goddess could do for them was to allow them to come to an end in such a state, such that their lives could be judged in light of the blessed state into which they had arrived.
Ancient Greeks had an obsession with judging. Under Solon, citizens gained more access to the political process, a major aspect of which was participating in trials. Court proceedings were very solemn affairs, because the harshness of punishments meant that the stakes were high. Judgment could easily result in execution — and when this is the case, even if one claims to be judging a single, discreet matter, one is actually judging an entire life. Perhaps this explains the importance of Solon’s story for the ancient Greeks; they knew that a life can only be summed up and judged as a totality when it is known as a totality and seen from that perspective.
These days, we don’t feel the need to go to the law courts in order to exact judgment. In fact, opportunities for it are all around us, and we increasingly see situations that would not have formerly appeared to call for it as now demanding it. A while back I read an article entitled ‘What can you do about the Trumpites next door?’ in which the author, Virginia Heffernan, described how some MAGA neighbors shoveled her driveway after a snowstorm, which led to a sort of existential crisis. These neighbors were being nice, but, she reasoned, perhaps that was just because they were all from the same demographic; if she were of a different race, perhaps they wouldn’t be so nice. This seemed to leave the author feeling stuck. Should she be appreciative and friendly to the neighbors because they were nice to her, or should she be cold and distant, regardless of the kind gesture of the neighbors, out of a presumption that they are bigots to other people? A neighbor shoveling one’s driveway didn’t used to lead to an angsty quest for totalizing judgment; now it does.
I’ve also been watching a superhero series recently in which similar questions are being asked. The superhero has a mother who will use her wealth and power in any way she deems necessary in order to “protect” her children — that is, in order to act in what she perceives to be their best interest. At one point, she risks the lives of thousands of people in the interest of keeping her own two children safe. The children, when they learn of some of the Faustian bargains she has made on their behalf, vacillate between despising her for being so scheming and diabolical and loving her for the intense, no-holds-barred devotion she demonstrates. When she finally sacrifices her own life to protect them, their assessment of their mother lands permanently on the side of honoring her rather than condemning her (although they do occasionally acknowledge her tendency towards questionable judgments).
It just may be social conditioning, but I suspect that it’s ingrained in human nature to do unto others as they have done unto us. If a person has been gracious to us, it seems inappropriate not to be gracious in return — especially when we are on the receiving end not just of genuinely kind behavior, but deep, sacrificial love. Is the correct response to go against what feels natural and to snub such people if we either suspect or know that their behavior towards certain other kinds of people is bigoted and hateful rather than kind and loving?
This is apparently not a new problem. Virginia Heffernan relates meeting a French family who remembered the Nazi occupation fondly. Why did they like the Nazis? Because they were “polite.” The Nazis were nice to them, and so they had a favorable judgment of the Nazis. Going even further back, we find advice to a first century community that seemed to be having this problem at a corporate level. In a letter by the apostle Paul to the church at Corinth, the author comments,
“It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that is not found even among pagans; for a man is living with his father’s wife. And you are arrogant! Should you not rather have mourned, so that he who has done this would have been removed from among you? For though absent in body, I am present in spirit; and if present I have already pronounced judgment in the name of the Lord Jesus on the man who has done such a thing.”
It is apparently easier for Paul, who is not there, to judge this man than it is for all the people around him. This fellow is presumably likeable, or at least sympathetic, in person, which makes it impossible for the people around him to judge him, despite the fact that he has taken his own stepmom as a mistress. The only party not being swayed by his personability is the absent one.
Is it any wonder that the polarities in our society have gotten even worse during the pandemic, as we have all been “absent” from one another? The negative opinions we have of those with whom we disagree are not being mitigated by personal connection. Normally, that personal connection creates a kind of cognitive dissonance between what we think generally of people who hold opinions and condone behaviors we dislike and what we think specifically of the particular person in front of us. Even when we don’t feel particularly warmly towards such a person, our interactions usually force us to see them in a nuanced way, rather than in the totalizing way that is so easy from a position of absence. We find it much, much harder to make the kind of sweeping judgments that Heffernan felt she ought to be making about her neighbors.
I once had a boss, the manager of my manager, who had the emotional maturity of a middle schooler. I already knew this about her (and so did others in the organization; there were people who would have loved to be in the department she ran but refused to work with her directly). One day I ended up in a difficult situation with a customer which I was trying to handle myself, but she got wind of it and sidelined my own manager in order to attempt to throw me under the bus. He stood up to her, knowing that her meddling was inappropriate, and shortly thereafter was fired. She then hired someone who would offer no resistance. I was furious and vowed to quit as soon as I could manage it, but in the meantime, I was completely consumed with rage at her behavior. Unfortunately, nobody else was planning on quitting, and therefore all my coworkers had a vested interest in ignoring my constant fuming, which felt a bit like gaslighting and just made me feel even more frustrated.
Finally, one day after work, an older coworker, someone who had worked there for several decades, decided it was time to engage with me. He agreed that her behavior was problematic and noted that it was the type of thing he’d observed in her ever since she started working for the organization. But then he started to contextualize it. She had a particular family background that made her authoritarian leanings understandable. She had a disability that limited her in many ways and apparently is what led to her mentality of trying to control everything she could. He wasn’t excusing her, but he was widening my perspective.
After that conversation, I was still angry that a person like her had been given a position of power over others (and I still quit as soon as I could), but it wasn’t eating me up any more, because my anger was complicated by pity. In a general way, I dislike emotionally unstable authoritarians being given power, but in this specific case, I now could see beyond that to the particularities of why she was the way she was. She had gone from being a member of a category by which her entire person could be judged (like “Probably-Racist MAGA” or, in this case, “Immature Fascist”) to being a complex individual.
When we dislike people with whom we must be in some sort of personal relationship, their specificity and particularity can help us relate to them not as some sort of archetype, but as broken, embodied creatures. However, when someone with whom we have some sort of personal relationship (such as results from the kind of daily interactions between people living in the same community, even when some are Nazis!) engages in likable behaviors, such that all personal interactions are genial and pleasant, this relatability may cause us to ignore larger problems. It may take a more objective voice, coming from more of a distance, to speak into the situation and call our attention to that bigger picture. “Yes, he’s a nice guy, but he’s banging his stepmom! That trumps his niceness!! You may not feel ill-disposed towards him, but you must judge his behavior. Even if you aren’t seeing the behavior directly, if you know it’s happening, you may not choose to ignore it, even in the face of his relentless personal charm or whatever other reasons you have to feel sympathetic.”
The apostle Paul calls the behavior of those who choose to ignore such evil “arrogance.” Why is it arrogant to be charmed by niceness (or, say, a sort of alluring pathos — for those of us who are attracted to people who seem to need us)? The person who believes he or she can safely ignore the evil done to others in order to maintain cordial relations with the evildoer, the person who prioritizes cordiality over justice, is in a privileged position. He or she is choosing to privilege the fact of not being personally victimized by the evil behavior, of not being personally inconvenienced, over addressing the evil. It is arrogant to ignore evil just because it’s easier — because being nice to the person engaging in evil behavior makes us feel better than being antagonistic.
The word translated as “arrogant” in the apostle Paul’s letter literally means “puffed up” or “inflated” with breath; it means that one is full of air. This is contrasted with the idea of “spirit,” which is when one is filled with the pneuma, the life-giving breath, of God. Paul says that he is present in spirit. The presence of spirit in the situation, in other words, leads to judgment, and should whether or not the person judging by the spirit is physically present or absent.
So what to do about the Trumpites next door? What to do about the Commie Leftists next door? What to do about the nice Nazi who opens doors for you or shovels your driveway? What to do about the nasty Nazi who seems intent on catching you doing something for which you can be caught, interrogated, and killed…or the boss who, one suspects, would have been such a Nazi? I suspect the answer is the same as the answer to what ought to be done about the people whose online opinions we can’t stand, and the people whose online opinions we always agree with. We need to invite cognitive dissonance, we need to seek out complication.
When it came to my boss, I couldn’t do this alone. I already knew the things about my boss that my coworker pointed out — her family background, her disability — but he was the one who broadened my very narrow perspective on her in order to incorporate those facts into my perspective. He validated my experience while also playing devil’s advocate. He could do this because he had known her longer and had already come to terms with her vindictive and controlling behavior. He had come to a more humanizing perspective not by focusing the ways in which she was “nice” (which she certainly could be, in certain situations), but by bringing her brokenness, the weakness she was attempting desperately to hide, to the forefront. I have been describing this in terms of trading generality for specificity. However, it may be more helpful to think of this in terms of complicating my specificity, with which I made into generalizations about her (turning her into an archetypal Vile Authoritarian, for instance), with her specificity (in which she morphed back into a broken individual). Note: I’m using the word “complicating” rather than “replacing” intentionally.
In situations in which we are inclined to like someone based on our experience, we again can’t do this alone, and need devil’s advocates. The specificity of our personal experience — which, again, we are too tempted to generalize — needs again to be complicated, this time by an outside perspective. This might come in the personal experience of others who haven’t experienced the person in the same way, or it come from a person who is simply pointing out, “That behavior is inexcusable, and that fact ought to trump the cordial relations you have with them.” Again, the focus is on specificity, not on generalizing labels.
So, in the case of the neighbor who is genial but whose politics we dislike, I suspect that the cognitive dissonance between judging from outside and experiencing from the inside should be leading the author of the article to find out more about how others experience these neighbors. This is best done by talking to such ‘others’, of course, but we don’t always have the ability to seek out such voices directly. For instance, if Heffernan wants to know whether her neighbors are racist, she may not know anyone who might have experienced it if they were. However, perhaps if she actually had a conversation with them, she might find out that they volunteer with refugees once a week and have beloved family members who are of a different race, and that their politics come from concerns or priorities or beliefs which she never would have guessed at. Or she might find out that they are in fact the racists she suspects they are based on comments they make about refugees and miscegenation. Cognitive dissonance provides a great starting point for interrogating our initial reactions to other people, but ultimately our judgments need to be grounded in concrete knowledge, not assumptions.
Whatever the results of this process of seeking out cognitive dissonance may be, the reason for assessing and judging our fellow human beings is not because we ourselves deserve to sit in the place of ultimate judgment, but rather, because acting rightly depends on discernment, and one of the big things we have to discern is whether our attitudes towards people are leading us to act responsibly toward them and others. We all have our brokenness, and deserve to be understood in light of it, but if your sympathizing with me leads to your ignoring all the Nazi-esque things I’m inflicting on others, then this is not a responsible use of your relationship with me. Further, if you sympathizing with me leads you to ignore all the Nazi-esque things I’m inflicting on you, this is not a responsible attitude towards yourself. It’s time to step away and view the situation from a different perspective: Here’s a broken person doing the unacceptable. Unacceptable is unacceptable, no matter how nice or sympathetic the abuser is to those who aren’t direct victims.
The solution is not to label the person being judged with a totalizing judgment. We often think that stepping back and viewing the forest for the trees means just that. But just because there is some aspect to a person that is unacceptable, and it takes stepping back to see that, doesn’t mean that the person is bad in toto. Bryan Stephenson, a lawyer who has represented many death row inmates (including some who definitely did the crime and some who were completely innocent), has noted that one of the things he has had to keep in mind as he meets with and defends people who have been accused of heinous, evil acts is that no one is equal to the worst thing he or she has ever done. A terrible act may be legally definitive, as when one is sentenced to death for it, but it isn’t necessarily constitutive. Knowing what I was capable of at my worst does not tell you everything there is to know about me. It’s an important fact, for sure, but it’s not everything.
Once I could look past my anger at my boss, I was able to reflect back on myself enough to recognize the degree to which own fury was itself problematic, because a lot of it was caused not by the injustice she had done to me, but by the fact that she had injured my pride. It was, in other words, arrogance — just a lot of hot air. And it took listening to another person’s perspective in order to replace that empty air with living spirit. My righteous indignation was just to the extent that she had been unfair to me, but it had puffed up to swallow up her entire being. For weeks, I was spending my mental capital trying to find just the right label to completely capture all that she was in a handy epithet that could encompass my rage. I wanted to find a very small and very simplistic box to stuff her in. Had I happened to have the ear of a goddess in that moment of finding the right totalizing generalization, I would have asked that my boss’ entire life be judged by the moment she harmed me — that she be captured and hauled before the Heliaia, that that judgment might be stamped over her life like a summarizing epitaph.
But if even death row inmates are on a journey that has not reached its end, how much more so the rest of us. There are people who deserve severe judgment for particulars in their lives — particular attitudes or actions — and our refusal to judge them may prevent them from making the next step they need to be taking, whether that’s recognizing their own brokenness, or healing from it. At the same time, judging others by dumping them into baskets with all our favorite labels seems to be a particularly popular pastime in this day and age, and it often is used as a mask to prevent us from having to see and confront our own brokenness. The urge to judge has its place, but it tends to want to spill out everywhere.
The necessity of judgment, the necessity of choosing how to act towards people, naturally inclines us towards generalization. We are creatures of induction; we assume that anything we observe can be expanded into a general law. If the sun rose yesterday and today, we assume it will rise every day. We have to make such assumptions all the time, and they are largely unconscious. When a person extends his or her hand towards us and we decide whether or not to shake it, we’re usually not just making a decision about how we will act in the next five seconds, we’re making a decision about how we will orient ourselves towards that person for the foreseeable future. We’re deciding how to label that person and our mutual relationship within the sphere of available categories.
There’s nothing wrong with having that instinct, but things are never that simple. Cleobis and Biton may have been memorialized in a certain way based on their last selfless act towards their mother, and death row inmates may be remembered by the way their lives end, but that isn’t all there is to know. Cleobis and Biton may have been nice to their mother and mean to the immigrants down the street. The death row inmate may have been homicidal to his mother but full of hospitality for the immigrants down the street. The Nazi may have been actively terrorizing some people in order to protect others, or despite protecting others. So too the superhero’s mother.
Our responsibility lies in exhaling out the arrogance of assuming we can know all there is to know based just on a tiny slice of information, and praying to be filled with the enlightening pneuma of divine wisdom.
Then, taking a deep, deep breath, it’s time to plunge in to the vast ocean of human complexity — not, ultimately, to judge, but to act.
