#writ large

the red peeled beet

the men we meet

every ledge every seed

every peer we see bleed

wet when tested

free when blessed

her revenge be she freed

The reason I say “Make sure there’s both emotion and reason in your morality?” 

Listen to the guy laughing at those of us who keep emotion in it.

Then you might see what I’m trying to tell you.

so my numbers were 42-60-3-98-37-9-54-59-18-57, and here is the little flash piece i wrote.

(it is kinda sad and there are themes of death happy halloween)

Writ Large Podcast “What Zora Neale Hurston Can Teach Us About Cancel Culture” (2020)

Zachary Davis and Joshua Bennett discuss Zora Neale Hurston and her book Their Eyes Were Watching God.

I’m not a neuroscientist and the plural of anecdote isn’t data, so i could be seeing a pattern where there are just a small handful of exceptional events, or guessing incorrectly what’s going through people’s brains anyway, or thinking someone is articulating their motivations when actually they are blanking because someone gave them a mic suddenly, or going wrong in any number of ways, but

I’ve noticed that when someone does something we see as sudden and heroic--say, for example, that boy who noticed someone kidnapping a young girl and followed the kidnapper on his bike until the kidnapper gave up--and the media interviews the person, there seems to be a... type of answer that people often give, which is 

“I don’t think of myself as a hero. I just saw something going wrong and tried to fix it. Anybody would! It’s the right thing to do!”

Which I was already personally fascinated with because actually “anybody would” is often not true--people feel nervous to be the first one to act, or worry they’ll get it wrong somehow, etc. There’s been back and forth about how intense the bystander effect IS--Kitty Genovese’s murder, for example, was misreported as if everyone ignored it when that wasn’t actually so--but there is definitely a thing where some people stand around fretting in emergencies rather than acting, and lose precious time.

So these people (ass-u-ming they aren’t just derping in front of a camera and having trouble explaining) are doing two things: typical-minding (assuming their action is not actually remarkable at all, because everyone is like them) and having difficulty explaining their motivation or their impetus to act.

It’s certainly POSSIBLE that what they’re doing could be something like emotionless, purely reasoned utilitarian calculus, but it happens so fast that they don’t notice they did it, like adding 2 + 2 in your head. But it seems to me also possible--and this seems TO ME, at least, like the more Occam’s Razor-y explanation--that they’re acting on some kind of moral instinct, and that this isn’t so much doing moral math in your head as it is being driven by emotion.

But in that case, it would seem like emotions do have a role in actions we consider profoundly morally laudatory, so the idea that there are “two tracks” that never overlap seems false. 

(Or perhaps all of these people are NT or at least not autistic, and so the likelihood of an autistic person being instinctively heroic in this precise way are lower--but I’m not sure that matches my observations of autistic people I know, and it sounds kinda judgey?)