This story begins a few decades before I was born. I wasn’t there, of course; all I have is a handful of stories. The scene is my dad’s childhood home. My grandparents were people with strong moral convictions, convictions that most of us today would see as righteous. My grandmother socialized with Black and Jewish people, which got the family kicked out of the most liberal white church in town. My grandfather contributed a large sum of money to help fund a hospital ship bound for Hanoi to treat the victims of US bombing campaigns, which got him on Nixon’s list of enemies, which got him audited by the IRS seven years in a row. My grandparents stood up for the victims of oppression and they willingly paid the cost. But at home they presided over another kind of oppression, and the victims were my dad and his sisters. To start with, everything had to be done just so in the house; kept just so. A dense web of rules choked the air, and the children learned to follow those rules; it became the air they breathed. All but invisible to anyone on the inside, it was only an outsider who would notice. My mom, visiting as a teenager during the family’s Sunday ritual of reading the newspaper, was glared at for making a crinkling noise as she opened her section. She didn’t know that one was supposed to lay the paper flat on the table and ensure that the crease was perfect and would open quietly. Her sister visited and narrowly missed a scolding for carving butter from the wrong part of the stick. Glares and scolding were not the worst consequences of being wrong in that house. When he was about four years old, my dad was pulling a steel towel rack off the kitchen stove to solve the mystery of how the suction cups worked. The third time he did it, his mother grabbed the steel rod and hit him across the head so hard that he had to be taken to the hospital for stitches. Well into his teenage years, she would reach out and slap him. But these physical attacks were easier to defend against than the mental ones. Sitting at the dinner table, my grandfather would draw my dad out on a topic, provoke him into expressing a definite opinion, then cut him down at every turn with arguments that carried both the intellectual force of a learned adult and the inherent power that a parent wields over a child. Often, reference books were brought out to show who was right.
This isn’t a story about my grandparents; I didn’t know them well enough to really tell their story. My grandmother died before I was born. Faced with my grandfather leaving her for a younger woman, she hung herself just inside the front door. Perhaps triggered by the shock of finding her there, my grandfather began developing the symptoms of Parkinson’s soon after. By the time I could form memories of him, he would have been different from the man my dad grew up with. I remember him as weak, trembling, mysterious, inspiring not fear but perhaps confusion. By that time, my dad had given him an ultimatum: one more argument and their relationship would be over, and he responded to this by withdrawing, by saying very little. Perhaps he couldn’t trust himself not to pick a fight. And yet even though I never saw it, a shadow of that fear and domination at the dinner table formed a part of my immaterial inheritance. Luckily for me it was filtered through my dad, softened and transmuted by his efforts to overcome it, by his efforts to shield me from it, but it shaped me nonetheless. This particular inheritance won’t be passed from parent to child again. I had only two cousins; they both died young. I made a conscious and probably irreversible choice not to have biological children.1 The lineage of my grandparents ends with me. But when I look out into the wider world, I see echoes of that dinner table scene nearly everywhere. This is something many of us share—we are part of a larger culture—and that’s what makes me feel this is worth talking about.
There are ways of thinking that feel oppressive, that turn us into the oppressed or the oppressor or more often both. When we learn to experience their weight, their heft, they can feel heavy as stones. These are some of the stones that culture is built from, and they must come from long before my grandparents or your grandparents, they must come from a dark history of war and famine, slavery and migration. We wish we could just drop them, shed this oppressive weight, but the stones of culture are not so easy to get rid of. Our ancestors have built them into walls, at great personal cost, and our ancestors had their reasons. At times these walls seem to confine our spirits, and yet they were built to protect us from the world’s many dangers, and who knows how long our era of relative safety will last? These stones are the teachings of the survivors, and our limited experience isn’t enough to know which of them can be safely removed without the whole house falling down.
This stone I’m talking about today needs a name; I’ll call it the Arguer. Ever since I saw its rough outline, I’ve wanted so badly to get rid of it. Several times, I thought I’d succeeded, but then I would find it was still there, adapted into a more subtle form, as if it were trying to be stealthier, easier for me to ignore. This time I’ve decided to take a different approach and do my best to listen to it, to understand it, even to love it. What is it made of, and why is it here? Maybe this stone that seems to be weighing me down is only seeking a place to rest. I’ve built rock walls before; the essence of it is to think like rock, to patiently look for the place where each stone will fit best into the whole. Perhaps it needs to be turned on its side or upside down. Perhaps there’s another stone that needs to be put down first to support it. Finding its place of rest, the stone is no longer a burden, it becomes a foundation.2
The Arguer has something to say about this. The Arguer knows better than you. The Arguer has done a lot of research on this topic, actually. The Arguer is just standing up for the Truth, even if the Truth is not pleasant to hear. “Wait, where are you going?” says the Arguer, “I guess you must not care about knowing the Truth.” The Arguer’s real friends have the guts to talk this out. The Arguer’s only friends have the guts to talk this out. The Arguer is lonely; maybe it would be better to argue fairly, to swear off the fallacies and the clever tactics. The Arguer follows the rules, gets going when the going gets tough, fights for the cause of Truth and Justice. The Arguer is not only right but righteous. “Wait, why are you crying?” says the Arguer, “I was only stating my feelings. Feeling are facts.” The Arguer is missing something but doesn’t know what it could be. The Arguer is lonely; maybe it would be better not to hurt people’s feelings. The Arguer doesn’t fully agree with either side on this issue. The Arguer doesn't believe in Truth with a capital T anymore. The Arguer doesn’t really want to argue. The Arguer is just adding some nuance to the discussion. The Arguer has thought deeply about this topic, actually. The Arguer just thought you might like to know. The Arguer is just asking questions. The Arguer is missing something. The Arguer is lonely.
When I look into the secret heart of the Arguer, I see an all-consuming fear of being wrong. And as much as the Arguer might appeal to abstraction and rational ways of thinking, this dreaded wrongness isn’t really abstract, it’s something in the social fabric. When another person agrees, the wrongness lies quiet, when another person disagrees, it rears its ugly head. The disagreement must be resolved somehow, either by “winning” an argument, or by justifying why the other person must be in the wrong, or by pretending they don’t exist or aren’t important. The Arguer lives an uneasy life. Both the physical world and the world of ideas are in constant flux; the wrongness lies quiet but never sleeps. The Arguer won’t be caught sleeping; the Arguer reads deep into esoteric subjects, reads deep into the night. The night is dark and the air is murky; the ground shifts and undulates underfoot. The quest is never-ending; the Arguer has to keep climbing higher, out of the festering Swamps of Falsehood, seeking the top of the Mountain of Truth, hoping that the air will be clearer there. What if this little peak is only a hilltop at the base of the real mountain? But it’s impossible to know for sure. The Arguer calls out into the night, listens, tries to judge which replies come from above and which from below, which come from this hill and which from some unfamiliar slope. The Arguer is lonely.
The Arguer is lonely because the Arguer is armed and dangerous, afraid of the world’s assaults and carrying Argument like a sword, wielding it in self-defense. Most don’t dare approach within the reach of the blade, unless it’s to fight. Perhaps some few swear an oath of loyalty, and vow to battle all common enemies to the death. But the heroes always fight back to back, and the world is too dangerous to lay down their swords for a bowl of soup and a cozy chat. In quieter moments the sword is sheathed, but still it carries the threat of violence. The peasants tread carefully around the heroes, or slip into the bushes to avoid meeting them on the road. The heroes tread carefully around each other; any disagreement could so easily result in bloodshed and a parting of ways. Living by the sword, the heroes dress themselves in armor; they can no longer feel the breath of the spring breeze swirling around them, or the hand of a friend on their shoulder. These are the makings of a lonely life.
But the fault isn’t in the blade. After all, the woodcutter chops branches with an ax, and the innkeeper chops potatoes with a cleaver, and yet nobody fears to meet them. And the fault isn’t in the armor. After all, the woodcutter wears gloves to ward off the winter chill, and the innkeeper wears an apron to ward off the boiling soup, and yet they can still feel the damp cold of the forest and the warmth of the kitchen. No, I think the fault is in the purpose behind the sword and armor: heroism, ambition, accomplishment, self-preservation. The individual self, to the extent that it exists at all, is a very small thing within the vastness of the cosmos. Poised on such a tiny base, the Arguer is unstable, restless, dangerous. But if we can cradle it with fellow-feeling and human connection, it becomes the foundation for a great power. Moving from fear into love, the blade cuts through bullshit to the heart of the matter, nourishes us like the innkeeper’s cleaver, warms us like the woodcutter’s ax, becomes the scalpel of a surgeon and the knife slicing through the bonds of a prisoner. Moving from fear into love, even armor has its uses; the world is full of thorns and sharp edges, and it would be a shame to stay indoors just to avoid being pierced or cut. Moving from fear into love, the Arguer becomes the Shaman. The never-ending quest goes on, but with a different goal, with different monsters, with different maps.
I hope I didn’t lose you on that journey through an extended metaphor. I came at this from the side because I was afraid to approach from the front, wary of finding myself trying to fight the Arguer by becoming the Arguer, wary of lapsing into “wherefore” and “therefore”, wary of finding myself shouting from the top of a soapbox. I want to pay attention not just to what I’m saying but also to why I’m saying it. Have I written so many times to prove that I’m smart, that I’m wise, that I have a voice, that I’m not wrong? It’s the voice of the child at the dinner table, desperate to be heard, to be understood, believing that this could only be brought about by taking up the sword of words. I want to listen, not to the child’s words but to the child’s heart. I want to say, “oh honey, you don’t need to carve love out of the world, because it’s already there inside you.”
Although the choice not to have kids was made under different life circumstances, I don’t regret it; I love the way my friends are raising children and I’m happy to be an eccentric uncle figure. I feel my life’s work is in another direction, but who knows!
An interesting extension of this analogy is that when you build a wall out of natural field stone, you start with this big random pile of rocks, and somehow every one of them eventually winds up in the wall, fitting together more or less perfectly. It’s as if, with enough care, there’s no stone that can’t be used somehow. Maybe culture is like this too.
Just brilliant, cutting through clouds of social misdirection, ulterior motives, and hidden agendas. My heart is warmed and expanded by this compassionate, insightful, and penetrating stab into the deeper truths behind behaviours. Loved getting to the heart of the matter.
When I was having my fortieth birthday Bohdan gifted me with a T-shirt that said "It's not that I'm arrogant, it's just that I'm always right!" There was a piece of feedback for a fellow arguer. Some of my healing came from more than one experience at intensive three-day community-building workshops with 60 people in a circle in the room when my "arguer" sat back for hours at a time listening to pieces of wisdom come from those I might have judged the most unlikely sources. There were also hours of watching others argue and experiencing at a deeply felt level the futility of that. More years have confirmed that.
You are so on the track here. And it is, to me, a very generous offering of transparency and vulnerability to have named and now shared that pattern, honestly inherited, that you are unmasking. Thank you so much for continuing your path and for your courage. I can hear the arguer coming back with some disclaimer about how you aren't really courageous or whatever. And to the arguer I would say "Hush. Jesse's heart is at stake here. He's unmasking you and appreciating the potential you bring. You need not try to hide anymore. For the essence of Jesse is deeply good and he get's to receive into his heart the fruits of his inner work .