On the Painfulness of Other People Being Right
One of the most impactful lines in a movie I’ve heard in my life is “Just because you can argue better doesn’t mean you’re right.” This line, spoken by the main character in John Sayles’ 1983 movie Lianna, made me more relaxed about life in general. I suppose it cut through some of my German cultural background, in which being right is everything. There’s even a word that Germans have for it: rechthaberei. I could spend a paragraph unpacking the subtleties of the word, but it literally translates to “being in a state of having rightness.” In Lianna the movie frames the moment Lianna speaks the line in a way that makes it clear that the speaker doesn’t have the argumentative skills of her husband but is nevertheless doing a good job of standing in her truth, even if she can’t “win” the argument. Her husband demonstrates the fact that being better at arguing can sometimes mean no more than being better at rationalizing things that are wrong. The susceptibility of Reason to rationalizing is something the Protestant tradition has generally seen fairly clearly and is one of the reasons I value my Protestant spiritual roots.
Two events this week sharpened my thinking about the dynamics of rechthaberei - about who “has” rightness and why we think of rightness as a limited item that can only be held by one party to the detriment of another. A friend asked me to write something about authoritarianism and the United Methodist Church revoked all of its anti-LGBTQ policies.
In response to being asked to write about authoritarianism, my first step was to gather material from the public library and start yet another reading pile. I started with, and ended up breezing through, Anne Applebaum’s Twilight of Democracy. But that “breezing through” had to process an initial hiccup. Within the first few pages, I felt an impulse to put it down and return it because the author revealed a kind of Cold Warrior anti-communist Reaganite allegiance at the outset. I could tell she was the kind of voice who was the reason I not only let my Atlantic Monthly subscription lapse but felt a real sense of liberation and joy when I did. (She actually writes for the Atlantic Monthly.) Although I occasionally enjoy watching Nicole Wallace on MSNBC, who also offers insights from a more conservative Never Trump ex-Republican perspective, reading “my husband worked at the American Enterprise Institute” in Applebaum’s book made my stomach turn. Then I remembered warnings about bubbles, silos, echo chambers, etc. and pushed through. And I couldn’t fundamentally disagree with the book’s argument as much as I wanted to deny the American Enterprise Institute the smallest shred of truth - even truth by association.
To be sure, the book has a glaring blind spot: The extent to which fighting communism depended on installing right-wing authoritarian governments that were extremely brutal abroad - in Indonesia, throughout Latin America, in Iran. So, it’s not like I will end up endorsing Applebaum’s argument wholesale when I get around to writing my article. But the historical moment of the rightwing strongman - Putin, Trump, Modi, Orban, etc. - does force new alliances and solidarities. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” is not a good motto to live by, but it can be an effective survival strategy in specific moments. But the point is less that I can find why I’m going to maintain a sense of wariness with regard to Applebaum’s argument than it is to confront that initial impulse to quickly walk her book back to the library before giving it a chance. Reading the book was a good lesson in finding the humanity among people I have considered advocates for inhumanity most of my life. Applebaum does not come across as a selfish person - her anti-communism is motivated by actual care for people in the Gulag system. I still consider the general capitalist values she thinks will save the world to be selfish and ecocidal, but reading the book was a good exercise in realizing that “rightness” isn’t a possession like a scarf, or the football only one team can control. I can’t quite land on a metaphor for what it is, but getting clarity on what things aren’t is a huge step towards better understanding.
The dynamics of confronting someone else being right were very different when I read about the United Methodist Church officially repealing all of its anti-LGBTQ positions. Here, I find myself physically freezing up because I’m processing a more personally painful recognition that someone else was right about something.
Back in my seminary days, the United Methodist General Conference reaffirmed its anti-LGBTQ stances. In response, a professor whose lesbianism was something of an open secret organized a pizza dinner to process the event. I went expecting to be able to just commiserate with other queer people and regroup. Instead, the event was open to straight allies and at one point, one of the straight professors made a long statement about how being Christian means believing that good will triumph, that we have to trust that God won’t let this injustice go on forever, that the church will eventually change, but that there are some people who won’t live to see that change, and there are people now who are in too much pain to see that the change is inevitable because it is just and we have to keep those people in our prayers.
When I remember that moment, what I remember most clearly is a sensation of something in my heart falling over like a domino. The journal I wrote for a class describes my reaction differently:
Man! I have never felt so silenced in my life. There i was: a “they in a roomful of wes.” And every critique of the church that was racing through my veins was already set in a framework of everything will get better, must get better. I felt myself shrinking in my chair, turning into a tight ball and two things went through my mind over and over: the tune and words to Joan Osborn’s song “Dracula Moon,” and [Rosemary Ruether’s description of Hegel] “Before this heady vision of absolute Humanity and his destiny, poor empirical humanity fades away like so many insignificant centipedes upon whose vile miseries, broken hearts, and bowed backs the Absolute strides forward to its final self-realization.” And when i walked out, i was literally nauseous.
Had I found it within myself to speak up at that moment, I would probably still be United Methodist today. Instead, as the discussion moved on, I thought, “they’re going to pray, and I can’t handle it.” So, when the event came to a close and a student recommended prayer, I walked out, went to a friend’s apartment, where we got stoned and spent the rest of the evening laughing our heads off over the fact of a salad. The fact that I couldn’t bring myself to say anything is entirely on me, but it was also the moment where the saying about “the straw that broke the camel’s back” is apt. It wasn’t the statement in isolation that shut me down - it was how the statement fit into the patterns of prior experiences with United Methodism and seminary that made it too much to bear.
I never quite forgave either myself for my inability to stand up for myself or the professor for making the comment. Intellectually, I know the comment was well-meaning. Intellectually, I know the comment was a gesture of solidarity. Intellectually, I know the comment reflected genuine concern. Emotionally, it still feels like a dagger. I remember seeing the professor on a train ride some years ago, and he was looking at me intently. I didn’t reach out to him and mentally hid behind the fact that I look different with short hair and a beard than I did clean-shaven and a pony tail. I definitely see that mental hiding as a kind of lie that I’m not proud of. And at some level, I’d have liked to talk to him. But the encounter was a reminder that the wound still cut deep.
So, when the United Methodist Church got around to repealing all of its anti-LGBTQ language, one of my deepest reactions was “Dammit! He was right!” And I don’t like to validate that rightness because it feels like it invalidates my reaction. But of course, there’s a way I can turn from the question of “who was right?” to a gentler question of “how do all the pieces of the puzzle fit together in that moment?” I can be grateful for the subsequent emotional and spiritual difficulty of leaving the United Methodist Church because it is the strongest evidence of my life that religious community is one my strongest needs, non-negotiable, and I know to prioritize it. In many ways, it feels like it derailed a career path, and I still don’t like that, but it provided a basis for understanding myself in a stronger way.
I don’t like debate formats because they set up “rightness” as something that one side has and another side doesn’t. In some cases, we can’t avoid the fact. But when we’re dealing with complex issues, issues with layers, a verdict of “this side won” inevitably destroys nuance. And I am grateful that the religious community I found - Quakerism - is one with a strong commitment to a practice that doesn’t allow for any one voice to be “the right one,” but lives into a larger truth that everyone contributes to.
Also: “Dracula Moon” really is an amazing song.