Many years ago when I began grad school, I recall overhearing fellow grad students (in comparative literature, I think) discussing Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, the now classic Beat Generation story of travel through the USA. One of the students mentioned the main character’s deeply questionable behaviour – especially, as I recall, his tendency to form sexual relationships with local women and then nonchalantly abandon them – and the other agreed, responding “Yeah, On the Road is really offensive.”
I didn’t say anything – I wasn’t part of that conversation – but something about that offhand remark has bothered me ever since. “Offensive“? Is that the best word you have for a criticism, I thought? In the politically correct Nineties, had moral criticism been erased and replaced with mere “offensiveness”? Then something must have gone terribly wrong. For to my mind, offensiveness had always been something good. We political radicals – as I and the other students identified – were supposed to be offensive against the values of the conservative mainstream… weren’t we? Even now, when I’m far less political, I still love deliberately offensive humour – the bad taste of Sarah Silverman’s stand-up comedy or of South Park. To be inoffensive, by contrast, seems a lot like being nice, in the wrong way. If all that was wrong with On the Road was that it was “really offensive,” it seemed to me, then nothing is wrong with it.
What does it mean, indeed, to be “offensive”? The word has achieved a particular currency in the era of identity politics – a cultural product is “offensive” to particular groups of people. But what is that? What makes it “offensive”? Is offensiveness purely a creation of a postmodern era of heightened sensitivity? Typically, I think, something is called “offensive” because it is presumed to be insulting; more specifically, because someone feels insulted. I suspect there isn’t much of an objective dimension to offensiveness; something is only offensive if someone is offended.
And here Śāntideva’s magnificent words in chapter six of the Bodhicary?vat?ra come back to me. Śāntideva is an advocate of measured and pleasant speech; he is unlikely to insult anyone unless, perhaps, it is specifically necessary for their own spiritual development. (Thus he does direct some insults at himself.) He does not wish us to be offensive, then. But he is less worried, overall, about our insulting others than about our feeling insulted ourselves – concerned less about our offending than about our being offended. When others slander us, say bad things about us, knock down others’ praise of us – we are in grave danger not from these insults, but from our reactions to them. The latter are the real problem, one he addresses in a beautiful passage that may be my favourite in all his works, one I’ve been personally inspired by many times. I will let the (translated) passage speak for itself:
Just as a child cries out in pain when his sandcastle is destroyed — that’s how my mind appears when I lose praise and admiration. The word of praise doesn’t matter if it’s not thought; the cause of my pleasure is that someone else is pleased with me. But what do I get from someone else’s pleasure toward me? That pleasure and happiness is only theirs. Not even a small part of it is mine. If I get pleasure from their pleasure, I should get pleasure from everyone’s. Why don’t I feel as good when people are pleased by others’ actions? So the delight that I am praised is just the gesture of a child, because it is absurd. Praise, fame and admiration give me a false sense of security, and destroy my intensity. They produce jealousy toward good people, and make me angry. Therefore, those who attack my praise and so on are just protecting me against a fall into destruction. (BCA VI.93-9, my translation)
Thanks for this post. I’m interested in the acceptability of things that offend since I tend towards absolutism with respect to legal restrictions on it but tend to defer to convention when it comes to actually expressing myself (so no religion, sex, or politics in polite society :-)
Actually, though, what resonated most for me was the quote from Śāntideva since I’m a recovering praise junkie: Top of the class in school and college and now having to learn how to be average in the real world.
Thanks, Pete, and welcome to the blog! I sympathize with you in both respects. Being The Smart Kid got me some fancy degrees, but not much in the way of job success (or even happiness, to an extent). And I’m also deliberately deferring to convention on this blog in certain respects – especially, I try not to swear, unless I’m quoting someone else. This even though I typically swear like a sailor in oral conversation – I’m trying to make the blog welcoming to more conservative readers who might feel offended by such remarks.
Perhaps, Shantideva and Buddha were only interested in their own reactions to praise, curses, insults, and offensive cultural conventions. For as they said here is the key and to open the lock the key must be turned back to you, your reactions…”Ah, but I worked so hard for all of this, years and years of work…I deserve the praise and you have no right to deny me praise…what have you done…I have this; I have that!” And on and on it goes. Can it not be stopped? Can you stop it? Can I stop it? Is it possible to step beyond all of this?
Important questions. Śāntideva himself would certainly say it’s possible to step beyond this – but it might require multiple lifetimes, and at the very least would require monastic discipline in this life. Augustine would say it isn’t (or at least, again, not in this lifetime). But, accepting our fallibility, accepting we won’t be perfectly immune to praise-seeking (or other bad behaviour) in this life, surely we can still try and diminish it? The problem, I suppose, is that without the ideal of perfection on the horizon, the goal of self-improvement seems much less exciting, and therefore less motivating. (An important point raised in comments to this post and taken up in more detail here.) But perhaps learning to motivate ourselves to work for less lofty goals is itself part of the self-improvement we need.
I have thought for a while now that one useful way of thinking of philosophy is as a kind of irenic agonism. Can one imagine Socrates “avoiding the subject” just because it would offend Anytus? But as to being insulted himself, Socrates cultivates a practiced indifference. I often think that our climate is far too conflict-adverse, which leads us to be quite confused about disagreements. The line between the “personal” insult and the strong difference of opinion is crossed all the time, in ways that are usually unprofitable. The day when “that hurts my feelings” stops being a either a conversation-stopper or a provocation to a smirk, and is read instead as a factual report and an invitation to reflection on the part of both parties, will be a great day for the culture of discourse.
I do not myself delight in “the offensive,” in quite the way you put it; I do laugh aloud at South Park, but I don’t really like who I am when I’m laughing like that. I think this is because I find offensive humor just a bit on the cheap side. I like a little sacred cow-tipping myself, and humor has its place in this; but the soul’s appetite for laughter can be fed by a kind of schadenfreude, and usually I find the humor works mainly by the enjoyment of seeing our enemies squirm. This only goes so far before I start to feel more schaden than freude.
On the other side of the equation (praise instead of insults), as far as “skillful means” goes, education theorist Alfie Kohn strongly cautions against praise and rewards in any but the most natural contexts, precisely because (though he wouldn’t put it like this) it brings about the complex Santideva is describing: it accustoms us to delight in praise and not the praiseworthy.
There is a passage, I think in the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, that commends letting go of attachment to praise by the story of a monk instructed to spend one full day lauding the dead in a cemetery; the next day he’s told to shout invective at them instead. After they predictably fail to respond to either provocation, he is told to cultivate this same equanimity. In some respects, at least, the dead make good models.
Interesting food for thought on offensive humour. You may well be right. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that South Park and Sarah Silverman became popular after the Nineties. When I was an undergrad at McGill I remember the business school students’ association put up an ad for their formal dance which featured a woman in a revealing strapless ballgown – exactly the kind of attire one might expect to wear for such an event (and she was shown with a man in a suit). And yet there was an uproar in the campus paper, criticizing the ad on the grounds that showing female flesh is sexist. After growing up amid that kind of attempt to limit speech, there comes a real joy in seeing sacred cows gored – but you’re right that that can be very much a matter of seeing one’s enemies lose.
Re the equanimity of the dead, there’s another passage in Śāntideva where he repeatedly tells us to become “like a block of wood.”
Indian etiquette has a nice word for thanks – ‘santosh’ which is to say ‘very happy that I have made you happy’ with the emphasis on the primary fact of the happiness of the other and not merely my being pleased with praise or gratitude. There’s a slight chill off advanced equanimity.
Which language is that in, Michael? In Marathi “thank you” is not expressed in words, just with a smile or gesture.
The monk in the cemetery is a good analogy. but carry it a little further and suppose that there is a close relative of each of the dead standing by the tombstone. Now, factor in their response and you have a ball game, or life itself. Rather than having an ideal of perfection, something of which we have no knowledge, can we not simply use a facility we do have and know well, the ability to deny meaning to things. We have a primary directive:survive. We recieve thoughts constantly coming from memories, associations, and desires. We form an image of ourselves from our experiences. We carry an enormous room around with us filled with millions of things waiting to be brought out into the light of day. So, how can this carefully-crafted self, mesmerized by the physical world know if it is more than all this. Perhaps, the ultimate denial is to stand up to life and say,
“I have seen all you have to offer, the blood, torture, war,religion, pain, anger, and the fear as well as the joy and the happiness…Is this forever…is life feeding on life, the best you can do(if truly there is a “you” there)”
If there is an entity behind it all, it is in no way, human and has never been human, and is not concerned with my opinions as I am not concerned with its opinions. I am,that is enough.