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Even though it’s probably irresponsible to diagnose, amateurishly, from a distance via the Internet, I’ll tell you what I think to be true: Donald Trump is mentally ill.

Or, more specifically, and more fundamental to his nature from the very beginning — after all, mental illness can come upon a person late in life — I think he has a personality disorder, almost certainly one of the Cluster B disorders, probably narcissistic personality disorder.

I’m not going to take the time to marshal the evidence here — it is easy enough to find. Here’s my point.

If Donald Trump’s mind and personality is as deeply disordered as I think it is, then there is not much point in hating and blaming and cursing the man. If there is ever an appropriate place for hating and blaming and cursing a person, it is surely not because of a mental condition that he has probably been affected by since he was a small child. Indeed, there’s even something unseemly in mocking him, the person, as ridiculous and clownish and mean as his words and actions have been.

The man is sick. I truly believe that. If we are human persons and he is a human person, the only acceptable response to him is a response of love. And if the only form of love we can muster for a mean, small, twisted, stunted mind and heart like his is the form we call “pity,” then we should muster it with all the strength that we can.

If a saint can overcome her instinct of fear and disgust to clean and bind the sores of a dying, diseased, homeless person, then surely we can overcome our disgust at the sight of a festering and starved spirit.

What good will it do? They all die in the end.

A question to ponder, no?

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Pity and forgiveness does not compel us to stand within reach of an abuser, however. Dangerous tools must be removed from the reach of the people who would hurt themselves and others. That’s prudence. That’s justice: we protect the innocent, even from people who can’t help being who they are. Justice also demands that we insist on right and just behavior, we forcefully condemn injuries and wrongs.

There’s no excuses here.

But where mocking ceases, pity can remain.

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And on the other hand:

There are a large number of people who, let’s put it bluntly, out of pure self-interest and the love of money and power, colluded to put dangerous weapons in the reach of a literal madman, colluded to excuse his ravings and to call them sane.

Those people?

Not born that way.

I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions about what compassion for them should look like.

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One significant casualty of the Trump candidacy might arise from massive cognitive dissonance among well-meaning early supporters, like the primary voters who made this all possible, and people like them who told their friends and family and/or local news crews that they planned to pull the lever for Trump in the general election.

It is well-established that people will unconsciously go through all sorts of mental gymnastics to avoid admitting in the face of new evidence–even to themselves–that they have made a serious error in judgment. See the Wikipedia article “Cognitive dissonance” for an overview of the details:

In psychology, cognitive dissonance is the mental stress or discomfort experienced by an individual who holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values at the same time; performs an action that is contradictory to one or more beliefs, ideas, or values; or is confronted by new information that conflicts with existing beliefs, ideas, or values.

A key tenet of cognitive dissonance theory is that those who have heavily invested in a position may, when confronted with disconfirming evidence, go to greater lengths to justify their position….

Dissonance is felt when people are confronted with information that is inconsistent with their beliefs. If the dissonance is not reduced by changing one’s belief, the dissonance can result in

• restoring consonance through misperception,
• rejection or refutation of the information,
• seeking support from others who share the beliefs,
• and attempting to persuade others.

So let’s review what we have got out there. Unless you assume that most Trump supporters (instead of a small fraction) consciously relish the notion that girls and women are objects, seethe with more-than-implicit contempt for minority groups, and argue that Constitutional checks on executive power are part of the problem —

— and I don’t think that’s true —

— there’s a large bloc of people out there who are being faced with numerous pieces of evidence that they have judged very, very poorly, but are already “invested” in that judgment.

A population experiencing cognitive dissonance.

Some of them undoubtedly will walk back their support. A number will do so in the privacy of the voting booth, and then will hope that their mistake will just go away. Some will renounce their former support even publicly. They will admit that they were taken in — they might come up with some way to save face, to insist that given the information they had at the time, it wasn’t such a crazy idea (the past, even the 1990s, is a foreign country). Those people will attempt to start fresh.

Good for them.

But some fraction of this well-meaning voting bloc, faced with the choice of either accepting evidence that shows they chose poorly, or of forcing the evidence to fit their own unconscious desire to avoid that discomfort —

— some as-yet-unknown fraction of what is a pretty large chunk of the electorate —

— some of those are going to adapt by a psychic doubling-down on the notion that “what America needs is someone like Donald Trump.”

For a number of this fraction of the electorate, the doubling-down is on “Trump is objectively bad, but the spectre of a Clinton presidency is probably worse.” This development is not what I would call surprising, given the state of political discourse; America has already demonstrated, in spades, that we are willing to think and believe massively terrible things of even decent people in the Other Party. And because it maintains some hold on the evidence, it isn’t quite as alarming — “who will be worse as president” is, technically, a matter of opinion and prediction of an unknown future — even as the question is sidestepped: How bad would your candidate have to get, anyway, to change your mind?

I’m concerned about the fraction who can’t comfortably think of themselves even as reluctant supporters of an objectively bad man, or who are already invested in the notion that Donald Trump is the leader that America positively needs.

A number of people will not be able to deny that Trump said the things he said and did the things he did, but they also will not be able to divest themselves of their enthusiastic early support. And these people have only one refuge: to maintain that what Trump evidently is…

… is what America really needs.

This population, nudged by our common human need to not be wrong, is going to become invested in the notion that we need exactly what Trump is dishing out.

America needs, e.g., more honest talk, of the sort that goes on in locker rooms, where deal-making men don’t have to worry about political correctness. (link)

America needs, e.g., to be tough on crime, not soft like that New York DA who let those five confessed black rapists out of prison just because of some so-called DNA evidence. They confessed, didn’t they? (Link)

America needs, e.g., someone who will order U.S. troops to commit war crimes… what do people in faraway Geneva know about American interests? America needs someone who isn’t afraid to offend people — no, America need someone who takes visible pleasure in offending people. America needs someone who will stand up to obstruction in Congress, who won’t let legislation or advice and consent stop him. America needs a strong man, a proud man, a man whose gospel glitters with prosperity, smells of it.

America needs to call evil good, and good evil.

That’s what we will hear, because a number of formerly well-meaning Americans will need it, at a deep level, and they will need the rest of us to approve of it too.

They are going to say it out loud, and it will take an effort to fight this notion, because the more people are invested, the harder it is to cut their mental losses. It will also take more than a little self-discipline for the rest of us to fight it without sinking to that level ourselves, and to fight it effectively — because what effectiveness requires is for the rest of us to craft a way that initially-well-meaning Trump supporters and endorsers can save some kind of face, emerge with their tattered dignity intact. And that means forgiveness, something that is hard for every human, because forgiveness itself requires overcoming cognitive dissonance of our own.

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To sum up: This is on the GOP leadership. By signing on enthusiastically, by squelching voices of principled dissent — I watched the convention feed with my own eyes, don’t tell me they couldn’t see what I saw and hear what I heard — by throwing their weight behind this man — they legitimized a bad, bad candidate. They gave voice to ugly ideas. And they’ve harnessed human psychology to assemble an army of people whose easiest mental exit from the discomfort of what they’ve created is via 1930s-level nationalism.

We are going to be fighting this army with one hand, the other held out in an offer of peace-through-repentance, for a very long time.

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Just before Labor Day weekend, on vacation at family camp, Mark and I found ourselves sharing a table with a couple, their own kids younger than most of ours, who inquired whether our kids hadn’t started school yet. Here in Minnesota most schools do start after Labor Day by statute, though many districts have waivers to start earlier, so ‘not yet’ would have explained us; “we homeschool” is more accurate, and that’s what we said.

“Must be nice to get to vacation whenever you want.”

I have a few canned small-talk responses for strangers who comment about homeschooling. It’s better than it used to be, now that almost everyone knows someone who does it or who gave it a shot; we are no longer (necessarily) weirdos on the fringes of society. You really never know what people are carrying around with them, though, and I have learned to take a light approach.

Yes, it is nice. It’s why we do it. We can start when we want, we can finish the school year when we want, we can take vacations when we want. We can get up when we want, go to bed when we want. We can ski during the off season, when tickets and lodging are less, and travel for a whole month during the school year. We can send the kids to stay for two weeks with Grandma and Grandpa any time of the year. I get up in the morning, the kids are all still in bed, and I stand on the porch with my coffee and watch the school buses rumble by, and I am still glad every year. I never have to sit in my car waiting in a pickup line for anyone. We aren’t beholden to anyone else’s schedule, and I love that.

He was young, bearded, with a natural and affable laugh that carried across the room. His hat and flannel shirt and jeans could have belonged unironically to the Minnesota north-woods surroundings, or it could have been the urban hipster’s autumn uniform. The communal meal had begun with two camp songs: I had noticed him singing cheerfully with his kids to “Zip-a-dee-doo-dah” but when the “Johnny Appleseed Grace” began — Oh, the Lord is good to me, and so I thank the Lord — he’d sat down and attended to pouring juice for one of his kids.

Now he looked straight at me and grinned. “Now that’s a reason for homeschooling I can respect,” he said, “a selfish reason!”

I described the parent support group that I belong to, a Catholic group, and he expressed surprise that Catholics were into such a thing. In return, I was surprised that he was surprised by the existence of Catholic homeschoolers. It came out that he had experienced a fundamentalist religious background as a child, and he strongly associated homeschooling with that particular tradition. “Most of the time you run into people who are doing it for religious reasons, but I like your reason better.”

“Well, we do it because it’s what’s best for our family. It’s basically the only reason we homeschool — I don’t really have any religious reasons.”

That’s me speaking off the cuff, probably wanting to seem like Normal People to this friendly and likeable person who carried a certain prejudice — other comments he made throughout the conversation made that clear — towards religious families in general. In retrospect I thought of how I phrased that. I find that when I answer questions off the cuff I don’t make the responses I would make if I had time to think and to write out what I believe I ought to have said. The question I often ask myself is, which is the honest answer? The one that comes out of my mouth without thinking, or the edited version, the one produced on the staircase steps afterward, with the benefit of careful thinking?

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In some ways I have been asking myself this question ever since my late teens.

It is widely assumed that honesty is rapidly blurted out without thinking, that the careful presentation is usually a falsehood. I think there is a bit in C. S. Lewis about that, that the true nature of a man is revealed in the instant after you accidentally step hard on his foot.

But I am not sure this applies to everybody in every context. I have, or had, a sort of self-preservation instinct, or habit, that I have noticed for a long time — in company I don’t know well, I will hear myself blathering all manner of lies about my own opinions and history. Mostly they are about completely inconsequential matters — one real example that I remember from years ago, whether I prefer crunchy peanut butter to creamy peanut butter. I almost can’t stop myself and will not notice the lie until it’s out of my mouth. I was aware of the habit by the time I was in high school, but I didn’t realize how often I did it until I had been dating Mark for a while — he was the first person outside my own family who both knew me intimately and frequently accompanied me to places crowded with strangers, and he would call me out on it (later, in private).

I think I do it less now than I used to, but I am not sure. It’s unconscious, and I suspect that I don’t always notice myself doing it.

I am absolutely sure that it doesn’t stem from a deliberate desire to mislead anyone. Sometimes I think it comes from not really having a firm conviction or opinion, and wanting to say something; afterwards I sometimes find myself unsure (crunchy or creamy?) of my own opinion, and wonder if false opinions, like false memories, can be generated by describing them. Other times I wonder if I am ashamed of my own thoughts and have to hide them.

I think it’s a sort of misfiring of the mirror neurons: I am trying at a basic social-instinct level to play well with others, which doesn’t come naturally to me, and my brain guesses what people will be happy to hear from me and tries to produce it. Sometimes I think it is a result of growing up moving between two households which were in many ways deeply suspicious of each other, and not feeling safe in one home to express an opinion or attitude that might be imputed to the influence of the other.

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So which is true: that I don’t have any religious reasons to homeschool and it’s just a lifestyle choice, or that I do homeschool “for religious reasons?” I have thought about this many times since that conversation ended, and I am on the fence — it seems both true and not true, depending on how you look at it. The cognitive dissonance comes entirely from wondering how it looked to my interlocutor. Was I denying my faith so I would look reasonable to someone inclined to think it unreasonable? (I know I said it reflexively, so I’m not consumed by guilt here, but such a reflex isn’t exactly something to be proud of.) Or is this actually a true statement, if awkwardly worded, so that I was being honest?

In retrospect, the truth is subtler than that. Reasons rooted in the existential philosophy and moral system called Catholicism lie far back in the background, and permeate my daily routine at the level of structure while not always being explicitly called upon. I think this is probably true for a great many people with diverse philosophies.

We homeschool as a lifestyle choice. And why do we choose this lifestyle? Well, we want our family’s daily rhythm to be decided by us and not by institutions around us. And is that just because we prefer one to the other, or do Mark and I actually think we can do a better job if we set our own rhythm than if we teach our children to accommodate to the rhythms of the majorities around us? Well, when you get right down to it I think our rhythm is really better, at least for us — maybe a different rhythm is best for different families, but for our family the rhythms of institutional school would be okay but this is better. And why do I think that this rhythm is better? Well, for one thing this particular rhythm keeps us all on the same schedule, keeps us together as a family, keeps the siblings together. We aren’t all on different schedules of the different schools we’d be in and of Mark’s workplace, but we are on the same schedule. It keeps us together more. And why is togetherness better tha
n separateness, than individually? Well, because the family is the unit of society. We are meant to learn to be fully human as part of the family, not as individuals.

And bam, there’s the existential part.

Take everything we do (at least the things we’re sure and confident of, not the things that we wonder about, that maybe we aren’t doing right), keep asking “why?” and you get down to the bottom of it all, the structure, and that is where “religious reasons” usually reside. In that sense, we homeschool for religious reasons. I could have said so and that would be true, coming out of my mouth. Would it have gone into the young father’s brain and still been true? I don’t think so. He was primed to think of “religious reasons for homeschooling” as something more plain on the surface: people protecting their children from learning about evolution or from reading the wrong books or making the wrong friends. Or maybe something additive instead of subtractive: school time spent in memorizing scripture, opening and closing the day with prayer. And he might have imagined, knowing at least that religious convictions are often strong and absolute convictions, that a religious choice to homeschool implies a condemnation of the opposite choice.

But of course, if the conviction is structural rather than superficial, it can be strong and even absolute while the superficies differ tremendously. Mark and I, in our particular environment and with our particular strengths, may begin with the notion that the family is the unit of human society — in the company of all the other notions that together make up our understanding of the proper ends of the human person — and derive “we should homeschool.” Another Catholic couple, in their particular environment and with their particular strengths, may begin with the same fundamental understanding but derive an entirely different “should.”

What good reason do I have for anything that is not at bottom shaped by my understanding of the human person, of the nature and purpose of the human person in general and of my own powers as an individual person? And what is religion but that, those understandings?

And yet, can you imagine if I were to say to the young father, for example, that I stay home and Mark works because of “religious reasons?” Would it be true for me to say that, if I knew for sure (instead of just thinking it probable) that he would immediately form a network of inaccurate assumptions about us? It isn’t false, and yet it is so incomplete as to leave the listener room to fill in the blanks — predictably — with a very, very wrong picture of me — and possibly a very, very wrong picture of Catholicism as a whole.

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I have gone off on a tangent here, but this post was inspired by Amy Welborn’s second “quick take” from this post. I’ll quote most of the relevant part below.

I finally arrived at the insight, such as it is, that a fundamental appeal of homeschooling today is as a lifestyle. This is something that people who don’t do it, and especially people who are antagonistic to homeschooling don’t understand: its great appeal as a lifestyle.

I hope readers of my blog over the last few years have picked this up from what I have written. Much of what moved me to homeschool in the first place was a dissatisfaction with the lifestyle school forces on a family. We have so little freedom in the way we lead our daily lives anyway: work limits our families, as do economic concerns. School – with its daily, weekly and yearly schedules, with its homework and projects, with its fundraisers – slams one more constraint on. As I have written over and over again, the reason we accept this is that we accept that what school gives is worth what we must give over to it. The tipping point for many of us comes when we realize that what the school gives is not worth it and what it demands is counterproductive to our children’s flourishing and our family lives and that the resources available to us, our own schools, and our childrens’ not-yet-deadened curiosity means that we can do the same thing at home just as well or even better, and have a lot more fun doing it.

So yes. I miss that lifestyle right now. I’m consciously and intentionally trying to help us be as efficient as we can in schoolwork so that outside school hours are still ours as much as possible. And the younger son and I have settled on a vision of the future which, given the assumption that he stays in school for middle school (which he doesn’t have to if he doesn’t want to) which takes traditional high school completely out of the picture.

The thing about the “lifestyle” reason is that it resonates with people whose foundations are built on a wide variety of philosophies, many different from mine, but who recognize instinctively or naturally some things that I hold to be true with great conviction. If “religion” is about the nature of the human person, then many “religious” truths are accessible, observationally, to all humans — via scientific investigation, or via introspection. I think the lifestyle argument comes from a place of truths that are accessible to everyone, including people who think of “religious” truth as something pinched and narrow, and for whom the word is an instant turnoff.

What’s the conclusion? I don’t know; it’s fair to say that I am motivated to believe myself reasonable, to believe myself honest, and to believe that I am not so eager to appear reasonable that I will deny what I know to be true.

Flannery O’Connor famously described one of her characters in this way: “She could never be a saint, but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quick.” It’d have to be very quick, in my case, like before I could open my mouth.

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We just finished a family vacation in the North Woods of Minnesota at YMCA Camp du Nord. Every time we go it is a bit different; some years we have struck up many conversations with the other campers; some years we have spent a great deal of time closely together as a family. This year Mark’s parents joined us, which was lovely, and so we got a larger cabin —

— well, it was more that we snagged a larger cabin, so they were able to join us. Cabin assignment is by a lottery system, and we were lucky this year — at first, we didn’t get anything at all, but went on the waiting list, and they called us later to offer us a cabin that slept ten in the last week of the summer. We took it.

Anyway, this year it felt like a quiet retreat.

I’ve owned these Teva sandals for more than twenty years.

I determined to take no work with me, and requested recommendation for novels. My chief activity was sitting in a camp chair on the beach, where the creek trickles down to the clear cold lake and endlessly lays down its light sandy burden, reading in the sun. Late summer in northern Minnesota: the sun would go behind a cloud and I would put on my hat and cover my shivering knees with my fleece, then the sun would come out and I would take off my hat and fleece, slide my toes into the suddenly hot sand.

Nominally I was supervising the 2yo and the 6yo, but they didn’t take much supervising. The 6yo and a band of his fellows and a lot of plastic shovels were busily damming up the creek with a series of sandy terraces and logs dragged from the edge of the forest. I imagine the creek is dammed over and over, week after week, all summer long. The 2yo commandeered somebody else’s plastic dump truck and drove it endlessly in and out of the very edge of the lake. The first full sunny day he would not touch the water, the second day he splashed at it, and by the fourth and last sunny day he was brave enough to venture knee-deep.

I am not really a beach person, but I drank in the sun this last week of the summer. Lately, living as I do in Minnesota, and growing older, I feel more and more acutely the swiftness of the warm sunny days and the slow march of the coming chill. Summer no longer stretches out before me indefinitely. I know the snow and ice is coming back too soon. It isn’t that I don’t like winter up here — I do; it’s just that it overstays its welcome, and I never quite feel that I have had enough of the warmth in each year. As a child in southern Ohio, where winters are not as interesting or beautiful but where they last the correct amount of time, I used to comfort myself in January, at the bus stop, by imagining how pleasant it would feel to swelter under hot sun, and I also used to long in July for a single gust of frigid wind and a few pricks of refreshingly icy sleet. Now I still sometimes fantasize about the former. But not the latter, no matter how sweaty we get. Why bother fantasizing about the wind and cold? It’s going to be here soon enough, you can count on it.

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It occurs to me just now that I speak from a certain place of privilege, namely (a) my house is air-conditioned and (b) mosquitoes really don’t seem to like me very much. So there is that.

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Besides reading and being the designated person to “watch” my youngest boys on the beach — I must have put at least twelve to fifteen hours in on the beach in a course of a week — I had a few hours to spend with Mark. We went on two trail runs together and also a two-hour kayak paddle. I found that the trail runs seemed to make my troublesome hip feel better rather than worse. Need to find a new way to move around that is less monotonous, perhaps, than padding around and around the flat paved lakeside paths.

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I brought no work with me, but only leisure, which is to say that I brought a few books of botany and plant idenfication, several novels to read of the challenging and literary kind, and also a novel in French — I saved weight by downloading an offline dictionary app. My mother-in-law had brought a basket of crocheting along with her, and I contemplated that as I considered the knitting class that was offered as a camp activity.

What is your personality type? We are always asking this question, it’s a new kind of horoscope we tell. Sometimes it’s silly and fun (what Jane Austen character are you?), other times pseudoscientific (introvert or extrovert? INTJ or ESFP?), veers from time to time into quackery (Eat Right 4 Your Blood Type anyone?) and occasionally it hits on something that — not everyone — but some people find genuinely useful, even life-changing (I hear that pretty often about 5 Love Languages).

I have this one completely nonstop friend, whose six children cover a range as wide as mine but a little bit older. Her previous life was technical corporate training, so we have a kind of affinity there, each of us having turned a ridiculously analytic personality towards managing and educating a house full of children. She is constantly doing something, running something, creating something. I often suspect her of dealing with stress, or solving logistical problems, by becoming more busy. It is the kind of thing that in movies portends everything coming crashing down because no one can just keep going like that, right? But it seems to work for her — I suppose there may be a deep internal disaster that none of us can see, isn’t that always a possibility, but I can’t see one. I am fully ready to believe that what would exhaust me is what inspires, fuels, even soothes her.

We were talking the other day about cooking, and she commented how restful it is for her to be creating and producing things — how making something complicated and multistep, baking Bavarian pretzels I think we were talking about, puts her in touch with family members from long ago, soothes and comforts even in the busy-ness, when there is a tangible thing taking shape under her capable hands.

I am not like that, and that looks like work to me instead of rest. But what is rest to me is work to someone else. And superficially useless work at that!

What refreshes and re-creates me is learning. I told Mark as we picked our way rapidly among winding tree-roots on the trail, “One time when we were here — I believe it was in 2009 — I brought that one botany coursebook up with me, and I spent the whole week learning to identify different families of plants by sight. It’s so weird to think so, because there is no foreseeable use for this knowledge for me. But it felt so satisfying just to learn their names and to recognize them. I don’t understand what is so satisfying about nothing more than putting a label on a thing, but it is deeply satisfying to me. I don’t even expect or desire to use the knowledge to impress anyone, and the kids aren’t very interested in it either. It’s like the same thing that makes some people collect coins, or butterflies — you catch one and you put a pin through it and a label on it and you keep it in a case. Except it’s only in my head, I don’t even have a gallery to show anyone. But there is something just as satisfying, as if merely by learning to recognize the butterfly and knowing its name, I have collected it. I don’t need the physical butterfly, but somehow I have caught it and I possess it if I know it by sight and by name.”

And it is restful to me: study for the sake of study, knowledge for the
sake of knowledge. I try things for a while and enjoy the trying and sometimes never pick them up again because I don’t have to, there are so many other things to try. I read French for fun and write down the vocabulary just as I did in school; but I don’t teach my children French because to do so would be to miss an opportunity to learn a new language with them, so we learn Latin and dabble here and there in other languages, Italian, Polish, as opportunity moves us. I buy textbooks and struggle through them. I play with apps designed to teach children how to program computers; even though I once wrote code, I am rusty, and never was all that good at it anyway, and the latest app promises to award points for shorter code with fewer steps, and has constraints that make it interesting. I find that fiction, really good fiction, is too difficult for me unless I have uninterrupted time, which is why I took good novels with me on vacation, but I am constantly reading nonfiction as my light mindless reading to settle the brain before bed: a lot of history, but also sciences and disciplines of engineering, especially the ones that are more of a mystery to me because I didn’t have them much in school.

We say that introverts and extroverts (by one common and fairly useful definition) are distinguished by whether they seek solitude or company in order to recharge the batteries, so to speak. I wonder if we can also usefully classify ourselves by what sort of work we find restful. Not just what we find agreeable; There is work that I enjoy and have an aptitude for but that is still work to me — I am thinking of the school-planning here. I do it because it saves me a kind of work I like less (winging it in front of the children), but I wouldn’t do it for fun. But I learn for no good reason at all except that it makes me deeply contented and happy.

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Just one short note here without explanation: I erred gravely in thinking that this feature of my personality would make me an excellent academic.

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“Usefully classify ourselves.” That sounds like the lepidopterist-of-ideas in me again. No, I think it is useful — in the way that some find the five love languages useful — it can help us understand each other and give each other the space and resources that we need to recharge, so important in families; and help us to understand why apparent frivolities can be so desperately important — how close we come to striking someone else to the heart, sometimes, when we lightly tease them about wasting their time!

And also to give us permission to be ourselves and to love what we love. Extroverts and morning persons dominate, and maintain their hegemony by ridiculing night owls for laziness and introverts for backwardness, but why should there be only one schedule of wakefulness, one pattern of sociability? Is it taking it to an extreme, this claiming of being marginalized even in these areas of comparative unimportance, a sign that our culture is unhealthily obsessed with victimhood? Maybe, or maybe it’s just noticing the large pattern writ small, that humans tend to crush and shame differences of all types everywhere we are.

Anyway. What is work for some is refreshment to others; “leisure” is relative. What leisure of yours is work to someone else?

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France is in the news this week because of an incident in Nice which four armed police officers forced a woman on a beach, in front of onlookers, to remove some of her clothing, consequent to the city’s ban on “clothing that overtly manifests adherence to a religion.” Since that occurred, possibly in an attempt to demonstrate that they weren’t discriminating against Muslims, the city’s deputy mayor insisted that habited nuns weren’t welcome on the beach either, and then a French high court overturned the rule — probably setting precedent for dozens of similar rules enforced at the municipal level all over France. This still leaves open the possibility that the national legislature could craft a law explicitly empowering local officials to ban beach clothing that contravenes their sense of laïcité, or could even craft one that sets national policy.

Here are a few related links that set some context for the matter:

Wikipedia article on the 1905 French law concerning the separation of church and state

Wikipedia article on the 2004 French national law banning certain religious symbols and clothing

Raphael Liognier writing in the Macquarie Law Journal in 2009: “Laïcité on the edge in France: Between the theory of church-state separation and the praxis of state-church confusion.” This article is critical of French policy, but it provides a good historical review of how the French state put itself in this situation, explains the cultural concept that now bears the name “laïcité,” and describes some of the incongruities in the existing law.

At Feministing, “A Guide for White People on the #BurkiniBan and Discussing Muslim Women” by Mahroh Jahangiri. This piece reminds us of the political history of colonialists’ efforts to police Muslim women’s dress, reminds us that there isn’t just one true feminism, and, I should hope, reminds us not to treat Muslim women as political objects. Her seven pointers for writers are worth reading.

(I don’t go as far as the author to say that it’s always wrong to make analogies to other kinds of societal clothing-policing, but I sympathize. A well-crafted analogy can powerfully force an honest interlocutor to “see it from the other side” and thus open minds, but a poorly-crafted analogy can be legitimately offensive. If you’re not sure how well yours is crafted, it’s likely better to keep it to yourself.)

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So, not wanting to repeat what other people have written on the topic, I’ll just make a couple of comments.

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First of all, I have a strong preference for American-style civil liberties. I come very close to being a free-speech absolutist, interpreting “freedom of the press” to be a freedom possessed by the owner of the press, and “press” interpreted broadly to mean any means of publishing, paying for, or disseminating speech, and interpreting “freedom of expression” to mean one’s entire way of life in and out of the public sphere. So I don’t like the French system, no.

At the same time, I am interested in different possible ways to assemble a consistent legal approach to philosophical diversity. I like our ideal of massively free expression; but no real system is perfect, and one does run up against conflicts from time to time, and lurking behind it always is the logical problem of tolerating intolerance, or of somehow having to respect philosophies that themselves do not respect philosophies — the fundamental logical flaw of all relativism. Could there be better ways to deal with it than ours? Maybe. And it’s interesting to explore systems that may have solved some of our own persistent problems while creating problems that we don’t have. Also, I’d like to pay a little lip service to state sovereignty and to there being the possibility of having a set of priorities that is different from ours, that wouldn’t fly in U. S. culture, but that makes sense and respects human persons in its own way. So I don’t want to write them off entirely right off the bat — at least not just because it’s not the American way.

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So, it strikes me that one of the inherent weaknesses in the French approach to law here is in banning a kind of “symbol.” An inherent with symbols is that they are not universally agreed upon, and that they are context-dependent. So the French have a truly fundamental legal problem here, namely, that they have written their law in inherently ambiguous language. Perhaps it is impossible to write laws that contain no ambiguity whatsoever, but zero ambiguity is the standard for which all laws ought to aim; one could even say that to remove ambiguities is the entire point of having laws at all, so that people can securely know how to comport themselves so that the state will not lock them up or seize their property, and so that the people have a means of creating a state whose power extends to agreed-upon bounds and no farther.

So we’re stuck, because sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes an article of clothing is just an article of clothing. Jahangiri’s piece in Feministing points out that it is the white colonialist mindset that first interpreted Muslim women’s wear as a symbol of Islam, imposing a meaning upon it from outside. White feminists and rejected males alike continue to say implicitly or explicitly, “this is not clothing, it is a symbol.” French laïcité means a freedom from certain symbols in the public square; maybe this sounds okay, a legitimate expression of a state (not consistent with the American expression, but trying to be open-minded and tolerant here toward la peuple française and their distinct culture); the problem is that apparently, for the French majorité to be free from what they see as symbols, some French minority women have to be free from what they see as their clothes.

It would be less problematic if the French had just come out and said “We are banning visible crucifixes that are longer than 325 mm, and little round hats worn on the back of your head, and when we said that you have to show your face in public, we also mean your hair, unless it’s below a certain temperature Celsius or raining enough that drivers have to turn on their windshield wipers.” At least the ambiguity would be gone, and though we might object to the infringement on personal freedom, we could at least say, “Well, it’s clear,” and then we could debate its rightness or wrongness. But no, they had to ban “religious symbols,” which means one thing to one person and another thing to another. Which puts government in charge of deciding what your clothes really mean. And which means that you will never be judged on what they mean to you, but only on how they are received by other people, whom you cannot control. In other words, in a regime that bans “symbols” rather than banning specific objects and articles, individuals are liable for other people’s thoughts about them, whether those thoughts are correct or incorrect. And that is about as illiberal as you can get.

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Third, it is important for Americans to understand the French system as a kind of warning of where we might go, if the forces of “freedom from” get out o
f balance with the forces of “freedom to.”

Already there are hints of this in all the parts of the First Amendment. Politicians are speaking, it seems, more and more often of religious freedom interpreted as a “freedom to worship,” which is rather closer to the traditional French understanding than to the more expansive American one; our tradition is one of “freedom of expression,” meaning the freedom to live our lives, private and public, in accord with our beliefs. Speech codes which attempt to give people the freedom to live without hearing offensive speech are constantly being crafted at government institutions, struck down, and tweaked to sneak back in; they enjoy a great deal of popular support; and yet they exist in opposition to the American ideal (I won’t say tradition, because it has been so unevenly lived by minority communities in this country) of the freedom to express minority ideas. Interpreting expensively produced publications and expressions as a financial transaction that can be regulated — for some government-friendly spending entities and some points of view and not others — is another way the definition of “freedom of the press” is being interpreted narrowly. Some “presses” are favored as shrines of freedom of expression; other “presses” derided as mere businesses, the speech they produce interpreted as a product for consumption, and subject to intense regulation.

The French problem is a warning to us. They have tried to favor “freedom from” over “freedom to.” If we object to the results of that effort, we can learn from it and try to craft a balance between the two that will result in something more to our particular American taste.

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