Recondite Visions

When someone does something wrong, even when someone does something really, really wrong, or is just a huge evil piece of shit in general and is beyond any redemption, and you feel the need to call them out and stand up to them and condemn their evil acts, you ought to always do so with an attitude of dispassionate sorrow and regret that this person turned out the way they did and hurt people and caused suffering and so on, you ought to try to feel both sorrow for their victims and for the evildoer themself, that this is the kind of person they have become. You ought never take glee or joy in punishing people who have done something wrong. And if you can't bring yourself to feel any empathy for an evil person and can't help but to find satisfaction in them getting what they deserve you ought to at least try to disengage from these feelings and not to intentionally savor them and pursue them or glorify them. These are not healthy feelings to dwell on.

This is controversial because it seems to be in poor taste to insist that a victim of oppression, someone on the wrong end of a severely unequal power dynamic, needs to display empathy for their oppressor or abuser. Nobody wants to tell someone who was the powerless victim of abuse or genocide or some other crime of great evil that it is wrong for them to take joy in getting back at the people who hurt them. Nobody would want to look a holocaust survivor in the face and tell them they shouldn't celebrate Hitler's death. I certainly wouldn't take it upon myself to police people's expressions in this way.

But what I am saying here is that I don't think sadism is ever good for the soul, even the sadism of deriving joy from seeing someone who has caused others to suffer get a taste of their own medicine for once. I'm not saying it makes you "just as bad" or trying to set up a false equivalency here between the oppressed and the oppressor, I'm saying it's never healthy to approach justice as a vindictive or satisfying endeavor, as a joyful occasion to take revenge on people who deserve to be brutalized. You should avoid embracing this attitude for your own sake if nothing else.

Once you start thinking like this, once you set up a class of people whom it is okay for you or others to brutalize and to derive sadistic joy from torturing or punishing, you've become a fundamentalist and you've destroyed an important part of yourself. Even if you think some people really deserve it, if it's okay as long as the bad people are truly, actually, irredeemably bad, like rapists or war criminals or serial killers, Ontologically Evil™ Bad People, once you've made the distinction that there are in fact some people who it is okay to derive joy from hurting you have made a serious moral error and poisoned yourself.

Why do I think this? There are two main reasons. First, basic epistemic humility. I'm sure everyone reading this is convinced that you would never take glee in hurting someone unless you were certain they really did deserve it, that their status as an Ontologically Evil™ Bad Person Who Deserves To Be Punished is beyond any doubt. But nearly every single person throughout human history who has taken it upon themselves to smite down people and deliver justice has shared this exact same conviction. I'm sure many of the people who burnt witches at the stake or stoned sodomites to death were certain that they were doing the right thing too, that these people they were hurting were evil sinners who Really Deserved It. You might scoff at this comparison because you are of course an enlightened modern person who knows that it is power dynamics and not christian theology which is the correct and sensible framework for determining who the Evil Bad People are, and equating victims of oppressive power structures to rapists or war criminals or billionaires or other categories of Actually Evil People is ludicrous, but this is exactly the point I'm making. The witch hunter would say it's ludicrous to compare nobles to wretched devil worshipers. Everyone always thinks they've found the final and objectively correct moral framework for accurately judging others. But are you really certain beyond any doubt that you happen to have discovered all the correct moral beliefs and couldn't possibly be making any mistakes? Are you really certain you would never judge someone wrongly or let your biases cloud your judgement, especially when intense emotion is involved? I'm not saying objective morality doesn't exist or that right and wrong are always relative, I'm just saying it seems awfully fucking arrogant to believe our generation happens to be the one which has finally got it all figured out and to leave no room for self doubt about our convictions. Maybe 100 years from people will think we're all huge pieces of shit who believe ridiculous things and victimized a bunch of innocent people who didn't deserve it, and maybe they'll be right. Once you start judging people to be less than human and to deserve to be brutalized you leave no room for doubt. You can't take something like that back.

Second, this attitude never stays limited to out treatment of only the most evil people but always seeps into our everyday moral judgements and gives us an addictive pleasure to making self righteous judgements and deriving joy from standing over others and judging them. This is a perverse incentive. If you derive joy from condemning evildoers you'll start looking for evil everywhere because it feels so good to find it and condemn it. This is how fundamentalist movements and moral panics begin. The lines get blurred and more and more people always get thrown into the ever expanding category of People Who Deserve To Be Hurt. Sometimes we turn this inward and are crippled by feelings of shame or guilt because we are never good enough to deserve compassion.

There is no kind of person I am more suspicious of, more wary of, than someone who derives glee from making moral condemnations, someone who hurts other passionately and enthusiastically with the justification that the people they are hurting deserve it. I will never trust people who act like this. Consider those pedophile hunter groups who make a big show of salivating at the mouth about how they'd like to torture child abusers. Are they motivated by compassion for children, or have they simply found a socially acceptable target to let loose their sadistic impulses on? If the goal is to prevent child abuse it'd probably be more effective and save more children to give pedophiles therapy and create support structures for them than it would be to threaten them and brutalize them. Everybody loves restorative justice and evidence based solutions to crime until the criminals are Ontologically Evil™ Bad People and then we say let's just throw them into a woodchipper. If throwing anyone into a woodchipper sounds fun to you, you should probably take a step back and ask yourself "What the fuck?".

I'm not saying it's always wrong to punish people or even to kill people sometimes, I think some people like leaders guilty of genocide should probably be executed, but I don't think we should foam at the mouth about how fun it will be to pull the trigger.

Here is a common example of d*scourse one is likely to come across:

Historian: famous historical man was known to have a lifelong male companion, they were very close, they wrote poems to one another, they even slept in the same bed, however this was all perfectly normal for two straight men to do at the time and there is no evidence of a sexual relationship

Present day person on the internet: haha, those dumb fucking imbecile homophobe historians, OBVIOUSLY those guys were gay as hell and secretly having sex all the time, I mean come the fuck on, how much more blatant could it be, are you goddamn kidding me, they SLEPT IN THE SAME BED

Unspoken assumption: romantic love, physical intimacy, and sexual attraction all being intrinsically tied together in a bundle package is an essential, universal aspect of human nature and not just something we do today. It Has Always Been This Way™.

Hi everyone, Anti Discourse Action here, I’d like to explain why I think that, while this perspective is very understandable, and there certainly are some cases of historians covering up and straightwashing seemingly gay individuals, there are also some flawed assumptions here that result from us projecting a modern understanding of sexual and romantic orientation onto people from the past who had a very different conception of love, sexuality, and intimacy. 

Let’s start by digging into the modern construct of “romantic/sexual orientation” and examining how this contrasts to historical conceptions. Today, we tend to think that romantic attraction and sexual attraction are distinct in principle, but nearly always closely bound together in practice, so we may be willing to admit there is some wiggle room for the two to diverge, but most of us, even very progressive people and queer people, seem to implicitly believe it would be very odd for them to diverge too much, for there to be such a thing as a TRUE “heterosexual biromantic” or, even more absurd and unthinkable, a “heterosexual homoromantic”. If a married, hetero man seems to have no real emotional attachment or closeness to his wife, but is very close to his male best friend, preferring to spend time with the bro over his wife, to the extent that he even cuddles with his friend, sleeps in the same tent on camping trips, and regularly expresses his love to him, we would assume this person is probably a closeted gay man, or at least bisexual. Two straight men sharing emotional and even (platonic)physical intimacy with each other makes us implicitly assume there is also sexual desire involved.

However, it is simply not the case that homoromantic emotional closeness and platonic physical touch have always been inextricably bound up with sexual desire. In fact, while stable sexual/romantic identity is largely a modern construct with little historical precedent, the ideal of the “heterosexual/homoromantic” man, someone who prefers to have sex with women while reserving intimate emotional closeness and romance primarily for for his male peers, was actually a very common sort of thing in many societies throughout history. Men have sex with their wives, they provide materially for their wives, but only very recently have we come to think there is a necessary obligation for a man to “love” his wife in the sense of deep emotional connection. Marriages based on romantic love have largely been the exception throughout history, not the norm. On the other hand, deep emotional closeness between male peers has been the norm throughout much of human history. There are probably more famous “bromances” in pre-modern literature than there are male-female romances. When you think about it, it makes perfect sense that this would be the case in patriarchal societies where women are seen as inferior and subservient to men. It is probably easier to form a mutual emotional connection to someone who is your equal, your peer, than to someone of lower status who cannot understand or relate to you as well. And as far as physical touch and platonic intimacy go, many societies in the past simply made much less of a big deal of it and wouldn’t have associated it with sex in the same way we do today. It is unusual for two adults who are not in a sexual relationship to share a bed with each other today, to the point where “sleeping together” is a common euphemism for having sex. However, in the past, two men sharing a bed overnight wouldn’t have raised nearly as many eyebrows. It was simply an economic way to save space and stay warm overnight. Even behaviors like holding hands and kissing as a greeting wouldn’t necessarily be viewed sexually, and still aren’t today in some parts of the world.

Now, this is not to say that men who seemed to be in love were never accused or suspected of having sex in the past. There are countless examples of accusations of gay sexual behavior being directed towards high profile male “bromances” on the record, often as a kind of political smear or a way of disparaging someone’s reputation. It just wouldn’t have been the default to assume that two men who were “in love” emotionally and spent lots of time together must necessarily be sexually involved with one another as well.

So, was Abraham Lincoln having sex with Joshua Speed, whom he shared a bed with for many years and wrote love poems to? Sure, it’s possible, you can’t really prove they weren’t closeted gay lovers, but the consensus among historians is that there is no firm evidence for this being the case. What about Alexander and Hephaestion, lifelong best friends who their tutor Aristotle described as being “one soul in two bodies”? Again, there is simply no strong evidence for their relationship, as absolutely deep and intimate as it was, having a sexual component. If they had been widely suspected of being in a sexual relationship this likely would’ve been mentioned by their critics, since(contrary to popular belief) gay sexual relationships were stigmatized to some extent in parts of ancient Greece, and Hephaestion especially would not have wanted to be seen as Alexander’s catamite, his passive sexual partner. However, virtually none of their biographers mention any suspicion of their relationship being sexual.

So, if deep and loving relationships between male friends was the norm for so much of history, why is it seen as such a bizarre possibility today for two heterosexual men to be deeply in love with one another? That’s a very complicated question and beyond the scope of what I’m writing here. I also haven’t even touched upon our conception of female sexuality and romance, and why “romance” between straight women doesn’t seem to be viewed with quite the same suspicion, which is a whole other bag of worms.