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Eve Tushnet

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Last updated on: September 16, 2009 at 9:50 pm by Eve Tushnet

2009-09-16T21:50:00-04:00 Eve Tushnet

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IN WHICH I STILL DON’T QUOTE OSCAR WILDE!: EDITED 9/28 to fix a ridiculously stupid mistake! …I’ve gotten two terrific pushbacks on my big post about sincerism. You can find Camassia’s here. And Miss Ogilvy emailed me thusly:

Just a quick question in reply to your recent “sincerism” posts: where and how does a gay self-identity (as opposed to a queer self-identity, which is a bit more flexible and maybe less self-serious) fit into your arguments against sincerism? I think one could use your definition of sincerism (“requiring a sincere, authentic, honest accounting of one’s thoughts and emotions,” which entails wrongheaded “assumptions about our ability to know ourselves”) to diagnose a gay identity as a symptom of sincerism or subservience to the sincerist ideal. Would love to hear your thoughts on this question.

And where and how does a Christian identity fit into your arguments against sincerism? What would a Christian apology for irony look like? Might be interesting to try on the following proposition for size: Protestantism serves the sincerist ideal; Catholicism does not.

Am feeling very sincerist myself as I sort through Gay Christian Whatnot. But I agree with you that the sincerist ideal is a mess.

I think it makes the most sense to reply to both at once. What follows will be so scattershot, it’ll make a blunderbuss look like a laser. But I never promised you a precision garden!

From stupid through cute and maybe eventually ending up in worthwhile, let’s proceed with our education, one and all….

1) I would never have cited journalism as a sincerist profession! But then my genealogy of the profession looks like “Journalism in Tennessee” –> SOMETHING ELSE AWESOME TK –> the New York Post. I suspect that there are other valid genealogies!

2) Maybe helpful: My problem is not with sincerity. I’ve seen women at the pregnancy center do amazing work through transparent personal sincerity. (It may be relevant to Camassia’s comments that the woman I’m especially thinking of here is black? But I’ve also seen white women make amazing impacts, forging incredible connections with women who clearly wanted a sincere and heartfelt woman to talk to. In my own counseling, I try to shift between more heartfelt and self-revealing talk as vs. more complicit and nudge-wink talk based on what the client seems to be open to. More on cultures and subcultures, and leadership, in a bit.) My beef is with the attitude that sincerity is always better than other modes of self-presentation. And this I think is a desperately American form of crudeness and anti-aesthetic, democratic/majoritarian well-meaning callowness. More on this in what follows.

3) Camassia’s point about anti-sincere strategies serving minority communities in their internal communiques against outside understanding or this-bridge-called-my-back-building is fantastic. I never would’ve thought of that, actually, and I really take to heart her defense of translation even though I think I still partly disagree.

Some things need to be universally translatable, like the Gospel. But does everything need to translate? Can we preserve some turf where the translator is still a traitor, and if you want to learn the language you’d better be ready to go native?

And what does it mean to be a Christian if your answer to those questions–like mine is, right now–is “no” and “yes”?

I’m not sure, and I think Camassia and Miss Ogilvy are both on to something supremely important. All I can really say in response is that I suspect that sincerism, like boboism (“bourgeois bohemianism”), attempts to assimilate the minority into the majority and translate in that direction–whereas Christian translation should work, I think, the other way. In other words, in the translation from Pepper LaBeija‘s language to Peter Sprigg‘s, a Christian should seek to translate Spriggish into LaBeijan rather than visa-va-va-versa.

I am open to accusations that this contrapposto stance simply reflects my own need to shore up my bohemian self-image. (She said, with a hipshot grin.)

4) I’m tempted to second Miss Ogilvy by saying that the Protestant denigration of “repetitive prayer” is a sincerist stance. I’m not sure if that’s true really, because believe me, Protestantism is something I understand about as much as I understand the higher math. But here’s something I wrote about repetitive prayer. Confession seems to work (for me, anyway?) somewhat similarly, in that the practice is so humiliating that it makes it unnecessary to dig the awl of self-scrutiny too far in: If I weren’t really sorry I WOULDN’T BE HERE, ZOMG.

I think Miss O’s suggestion that coming out is an inherently sincerist act is totally fascinating, since of course the gay subculture has traditionally (!) been one of the least sincerist, and yet I totally take her point about how coming out to oneself feels. Anyone have comments? I am at a loss!

5) I can think of two main categories of experience which prompted me to articulate why I think sincerism so often provokes bien-pensant stupidity on one hand, and cruelty-with-the-tweezers on the other. I have a hard time talking about sincerism because I find it much easier to point at than to define, and therefore it’s easy to pat myself on the back for identifying examples. There’s a way in which rationalism, for all its obvious falsehoods, is humbler than prudence, which requires so much trust in one’s own perceptions. (Even if the examples are taken from my own life, there’s still a showiness in the decision to display them in the light of my current better judgment.)

But here are the experiences. First, when I’ve been in a leadership position I’ve dealt with women (always women… I’m going to say this is cultural, and the guys would’ve framed their objections to my leadership this way if they’d thought it would win them masculinity points) who thought that the mask of command, as such, was inauthentic. Presenting a different persona when in leadership meant lying.

I think this is wrong on both rationalist grounds (I chose my leadership persona, so doesn’t that choice incorporate the persona into my “self”?) and, obviously, aesthetic grounds. Leadership is an aesthetic act. It isn’t rationalist, because there’s always another syllogism, or an alternative premise, you can pose against the syllogism which would require of you something you don’t want to do in the service of someone or Someone you don’t love. It is leadership which guides you to the beauty or Beauty you could love enough to choose one set of syllogisms over another equally consistent.

So um yeah. I will, if necessary, pay for your trust by sharing some deep dark painful secret–but I’ll respect you a lot less in the morning. I should be able to lead you without groveling for your pitying endorsement of my perspective.

b) I’ve several times tried to “relate” on a deep dark authentic level with someone going through a kind of suffering I can’t share. I’ve tried to ask How You’re Doing. I’ve tried to Be Real.

In no case has this ever been the right thing to do.

I get that people with much more sophisticated senses of how to be in the world (like Camassia) understand that what you do, when you’re dealing with another person’s desperation, is listen and be there and try to roll with what they give you, and not push. I don’t think any of that is sincerism, even though it’s sincere. But I do think sincerism is what I believed when I thought it was right to press my fingers against other people’s bruises. I didn’t think I was really acting as their friend unless I poked. I could not have been more wrong.

So that’s where I’m coming from, on this question.

6) I’m not sure I want to overphilosophize here, since really I’m not sure what exactly sincerism is–like I said, it’s easier to point at than to anatomize. But I am tempted to argue that sincerism is a part or a result of two philosophical tendencies I abhor anyway. (“You want a second opinion? Okay, you’re ugly!”)

a) My strong impression is that sincerism is connected to a belief that ethical discourse is the only valid philosophical discourse. Talk of right/wrong always trumps talk of beautiful/banal. (I hope this formulation indicates that I do think sincerity–like ethics-talk!–is frequently appropriate.) If you say, “Women covering their heads in church is just another sign of Paul’s misogyny!”, and I drawlingly reply, “Well hmmm, I’d rather see a bulldyke in a mantilla than a nun in a pantsuit”… I’ve stepped out of the ethical discourse into the aesthetic, and therefore forfeited my right to be taken sincerely/seriously.

(And I mean it, too! I’d clip a daggone diaper to my head if it meant that most women would wear actual pretty lace to church instead of board shorts!)

b) And on a deeper level, I really think sincerism is a subset of the Heideggerian fetish for authenticity and commitment. In this worldview, on the top level, Truth is found within–it’s self-expression. I know that there is no philosophy without some level of self-trust. A radical skeptic can purchase bread, even though he knows it might be a hallucination, but he can never practice philosophy, because Sophia is nothing if she isn’t real. (Even Derrida ETA 9/28 DESCARTES!!! “knew that he existed, and that he spoke French”!) But it is possible to distinguish between a philosophy of expressing the God within and a philosophy in which the self strives to recognize and love the God without–a philosophy in which recognition takes the place of expression, and submission is another word for love.

On the lower level, of course, “my real true deep self” becomes simply whatever my culture/subculture/biology/some complex interaction of all three tells me to value. That’s one reason Heidegger’s Rector’s Address (which I used to be able to quote, as a party trick) is actually a valid conclusion from his premises. The naivete of sincerism is that it assumes that the self expressed will come pre-tamed.

Miss Manners knows better.

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