I've been thinking about Colo's diary from yesterday about the moral duality implicit in right-wing values, as evinced by a woman she met named June. June went out of her way to help our Colo, a stranger she met in trying circumstances; and June also holds some bigoted views, declaring that a Muslim isn't fit to be an American president. I'm not going to talk about the duality, or cognitive dissonance, or the parable of the Good Samaritan. I'm going to talk about what Flannery O'Connor has to say about all this, because it's her birthday, and I love her.
Flannery O'Connor died at the age of 39 in 1964 of lupus, which she had watched kill her father. She was diagnosed with it when she was 25, and was told she'd be gone before she was 30. She is an amazing author, but unfortunately most of her work is still under copyright, so you'll have to go to the library to pick up her work.
Though she was a very shy person, she writes bitingly and critically of characters she described as 'freaks', people whose behavior and beliefs turn them into grotesque caricatures - a Bible salesman that steals the wooden leg of a one-legged woman, a murderer who drowns a child while reciting the rites of baptism, bigots, liars, arsonists, and solipsistic atheists, all of whom have elaborate justifications for the horrible things they do. Northern critics tend to describe her work as Southern realism; Southern critics (including Flannery herself) tend to bristle at the suggestion - Flannery didn't believe that her characters were essentially Southern, only culturally so, and believed that analogues could be found in the North.
It is easy to find examples of O'connor using racist language and denouncing the idea that there is anything healthy or societally acceptable about sexuality. She was a devout Catholic, and did things like ask her priest for permission to read Kafka. Yet, her writing is morally complex, subversive and heterodox. She is not one of her 'freaks'; she accepted the inconsistencies she found in herself, and in the world. She wasn't a hypocrite - she did not force her morality to fit the world in procrustean arrogance - but neither was she an ideologue; condemned to death at an early age, she had no interest in the project of forcing the world to fit her morality.
The prophet is a realist of distances.
~ Flannery O'Connor
One of Flannery's most celebrated essays is "The Fiction Writer and His Country", which was written in criticism of an article in Life magazine which exhorted American authors to focus on the good things about life in their country. O'Connor deconstructs the premise - she declaims that she even inhabits the same country as Life magazine.
Flannery wrote: "The writer who emphasizes spiritual values is very likely to take the darkest view of all of what he sees in this country today". At Daily Kos, we properly pride ourselves on being voices of the 'reality based' community, and it is appropriate to hold us to that standard. Yet some extend their definition of reality to encompass their moral premises, their opinions, which are real to them - beyond the reality we all share, of empirical facts. Its easy enough to say we're not all liberals - its important to remember though that those of us who are liberals aren't ethically monolithic.
The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may well be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience.
~ Flannery O'Connor
This is a problem common to everyone who is interested in philosophy, not just those in the theological niche that O'Connor identified with. As a far-left liberal atheist (and genius) put it:
The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one believes it.
~ Bertrand Russell
The first step in advocating for any ideology is to freak out the squares.
In person, Flannery was quiet and exceedingly polite; but we learn something of her inner life from the characters in her stories that seem to resemble her. In a scene in "Revelation", one of Flannery's 'freaks' is sitting in a doctor's waiting room. Mrs. Turpin, in her wealth and rigid Christianity, is appalled to be so close to the commoners, the "white-trash", who are "worse than niggers any day". In a reverie, Mrs. Turpin dreams of seeing them "all crammed in together in a box car, being ridden off to be put in a gas oven".
She begins talking to a well-dressed woman next to her, who is accompanying her daughter, Mary Grace. Mary Grace is described as an ugly girl, her acne-pocked face is buried in a college textbook titled 'Human Development'. Finally, the quiet, bookish girl snaps, hurling the textbook into Mrs. Turpin's face. Subdued by the "white-trash" that Mrs. Turpin hates, her face churning with rage, Mary Grace condemns the bigoted elitist: "go back to Hell where you came from, you old wart hog!"
I think that the Tea Partiers aren't Mrs. Turpin. I think they're the poor folks who restrain Mary Grace from commiting great violence against the odious Mrs. Turpin. The Junes of the world aren't bad people who sometimes inexplicably break character and do good things for strangers - I think they're basically good people, but misguided, in the most literal sense of the word. I would even guess that one of the reasons why many of them can be manipulated is because they're caring people. Apathetic people don't stand on street corners holding signs - some of those signs unwittingly support the military-industrial complex, some oppose it - but anyone who stands out there cares about something.
I think Colorado had it just right - be polite, respectful, and remember that these reprehensible ideas didn't come from nowhere.