Bad faith
Here everyone's real ethical, perfect judgment? How hilarious, farcical.
NOTE: This is a repost of an audio essay I originally uploaded to my podcast. Since revamping the direction of the podcast, the essay has been moved to the Obscure Arts section of my newsletter.
🚨 cw: transphobia, racism, and bigotry of all sorts
My dog, Castor, is a hound.
I mean that metaphorically, of course, but possibly also literally, as I suspect that he has a different father than his siblings. That can apparently happen in the dog world; female dogs ovulate multiple times while in heat, so more than one male can sire a single litter. Pollux is a herding dog through and through—Aussie shepherd and Aussie cattle dog together—but Castor seems more Basset than blue heeler. Even though Bear and I have seen pictures of the boys’ parents, I think their mama might have some ‘splaining to do.
Pollux is my ADHD Velcro gremlin, but Castor is a dog’s dog. Sort of like a man’s man, but the canine equivalent. Castor is the platonic ideal of Dog™—friendly, protective when necessary, and a bit of a charming pest when it comes to ladies of both the two-legged and four-legged persuasion. He’s a perfect gentleman thought, my Castor, always respectfully giving distance when asked, but that won’t stop him from being a bit of a, well…hound about them.
“He’s a lover, ain’t he,” one of the dog park regulars laughs as he vigorously rubs Castor’s belly. Castor is indeed a lover, and an indiscriminate one at that—of belly rubs and pets. “C’mere, sweet boy, and give me some sugar,” he coos as Castor pops up like a jack-in-the-box to lick his face. “That’s right.”
I take my boys to the dog park every morning, mostly to run off their 6-month-old herding breed puppy energy, but also for socialization. Theirs, and mine, if I’m being honest. Being a full-time writer doesn’t allow for much human interaction, and I don’t want to get out of practice.
“Castor,” I admonish as he jumps up again. “Off.”
“Oh, he’s fine,” says the dog park regular. I don’t know his name, but I do know he has a beagle-pit bull mix named Buster. I’m slower to learn human names than dog ones.
“Yes, but I’m trying to teach him some manners,” I say, chagrined. “I can’t let him skate by on his charming personality, you know.”
Buster’s human laughs. Today he is wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the Roman numeral III superimposed on an American flag—a symbol of the far right militia group the Three Percenters. “It’s all right,” he says. “Keeps him sweet. Just like his mama.”
I know Buster’s human about as well as I know most of the other dog owners at the park, which is to say I know far more about their dogs than I do their actual lives. I’ve always known Buster’s human was of a conservative bent, mostly because he has a car sporting a Let’s Go Brandon bumper sticker. I’m usually going as he’s coming; it’s too hot to stay outside much past 8:30AM, which when he and his crew like to stroll in.
But today is the first day the humidity has broken all summer, and I’m not averse to letting my boys play a little longer. Or me, for that matter.
“I don't know,” I reply. “I think Castor’s mama was a good times party girl because I’m pretty sure he’s got a different dad from the rest of his siblings.”
I point out Pollux to Buster’s human, and tell him a little bit about how littermates can come from different sires. I know he wasn’t talking about the boys’ actual mama when he called her sweet, but I’m nothing if not good at deflecting dirty old men away from perv toward paternalistic. Socialization practice.
We chat a little about our lives. He’s a retiree, an Army veteran who grew up in South Orange, New Jersey. The longer I’ve lived in North Carolina, the more I’ve come to realize that the South isn’t any more culpable when it comes to racism and bigotry than other places in the United States. In fact, the vast majority of the conservative crackpots I’ve met here come from elsewhere. As a former New Yorker and a Los Angeles native, I used to say that people go to LA to be found, and New York to find themselves. Now that I’ve been in North Carolina almost a decade, I think I can add that people move to the South to fuck off.
Well, white people move to the South to fuck off.
“And what do you do?” Buster’s human asks me.
“I’m a writer,” I reply. “I write fantasy books for teens.”
“No way!” he booms excitedly. Then he eyes me with suspicion. “You don’t put that sex shit into your books, do you?”
I know where this conversation is heading, but I’m curious how Buster’s human is going to take us there. "What do you mean?”
“That transgender nonsense,” he growls. “Did you know in California they passed legislation mandating schools teach that rot to kindergartners?”
I do, in fact, include trans and non-binary characters in my books, but I’m less interested in defending what Buster’s human calls the trans agenda than toying with him. A little.
“That’s not true,” I reply.
“It is,” he insists. “You’re not reading the right sources.”
“I was born and raised in California,” I say in a mild voice. “And my family is still out there. I would certainly know if the children of my friends and family members were being indoctrinated in schools.”
Behind Buster’s human’s eyes, I can see a sort of recalculation happening. Slow and sluggish, like the spinning wheel of death as an ancient computer tries to load a program it hasn’t opened in a while.
“Well, it’s true in Virginia,” he says, changing tack. “In Loudoun County, Virginia, a girl was raped by a transgender and when the father went to the school board to protest, they hogtied him and threw him out! It’s true,” he insists, anticipating another correction. “You’re just not seeing the right news.”
But I don’t engage him on the veracity of his story. He’s expecting that. He wants that. He wants to get riled up and argue. So I engage him at face value instead.
“The father didn’t go to the police?” I ask.
Buster’s human is taken aback by this question. Again, I see the spinning wheel of death behind his eyes. “What do you mean?”
“If my child were raped, the first place I would go would be to the police department, not the school board,” I say. “I mean, what could the school board possibly do? They can’t arrest the perpetrator. They can’t bring a criminal to justice.”
He can now see the logical hole in this story he’s gotten from the right sources. “They’re more invested in covering it up,” he says, but I hear hesitation and uncertainty in his voice now. The online warriors he tries to confront don’t argue like me, and he’s confused. “The police and the school board.”
“All cops are bastards,” I say lightly.
I can tell he recognizes this as a leftist talking point, but he can’t disagree with me now. So he moves on to another one of his buddies, and in the middle of their conversation, the other receives a phone call.
“Probably his wife,” Buster’s human sneers. “The old ball and chain.” He turns to me. “What about you? I bet you keep your man on a short leash.”
“Not at all,” I smile. “People used to pay me for that, and no one, not even my partner, gets it for free.”
His face goes blank, the blue critical error screen flashing across his features. Several more moments pass before he finally laughs.
“You have a sense of humor,” he grins. “I like you.”
I smile back. “I have to go,” I say. I’ve toyed with him long enough. “It’s later than I thought. Nice talking to you though.” And it’s not a lie.
“You too.”
The thing you have to know about me is that I’m a troll.
A lot of you probably already know this; I’m nothing if not contrary when it comes to the books I write and deliver. Expecting X? Well too bad, I’m going to serve you ㄹ instead! Some of this is intentional, but truly, my Gemini Venus is quite loud.
Being a troll has served me well most my life. I tend to take everything at face value, even if I suspect—or know—there is more left unsaid. Because of this, I’m hard to offend, or even rile into frustration. Even though I am visibly not white, I seem to escape the worst of the racist microaggressions I see leveled at my BIPOC peers. I attribute that to being a troll, honestly. There’s something about me that makes it hard for insults or bigoted attacks to find purchase. I’m slippery. A slither-outer, like the Wizard Howl.
Looking back, what I used to call a charmed existence was probably partially due to the fact that I’m a slither-outer. The moment I suspect an expectation is placed before me, I swerve to avoid. I am hard to pin down. It makes me a terrible debater, but it does make me an excellent diffuser of tension.
Buster’s human is one of the more extreme examples of how I’m able to skate through life based on my charming personality, but people like him are becoming less and less rare these days. And it has nothing to do with ideology; I’ve interacted (and socialized) with people on both ends of the ideological spectrum, and they increasingly all have the same thing in common.
Bad faith.
Bad faith as I use the term is a bit hard to define. To me, bad faith is a form of willful, malicious misunderstanding when it comes to any sort of orthodoxy that has the potential to contradict, undermine, or simply contrast with my personal morals and ethics. Or in the words of this (now suspended?) Twitter prophet:
Bad faith has become increasingly prevalent everywhere these days. I’m not on social media much anymore for this precise reason—not because I fear any personal repercussion, but because I find myself losing my equanimity. Becoming irritated. Turning into that old man who yells at clouds.
In other words, I’m getting riled up.
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m your classic pain-avoidant enneagram Type 7. The instant I find something tedious or uncomfortable, I’m out. I don’t shy away from negative emotions like sorrow or rage, but what I refuse to do is willfully linger in them. Sadness that overstays its welcome turns into wallowing, while anger that refuses to leave turns into bitterness and resentment. Both manifest as defensiveness, a posture born of an insecurity that those who indulge in bad faith seem desperate to avoid.
And we’re all so insecure these days. Why shouldn’t we be? The planet is rapidly, catastrophically heating up to unsustainable levels, the world seems to have collectively ignored the existence of a raging pandemic, late stage capitalism is fucking everyone left, right, and center except for the 1%, etc. etc. The pillars of existence we have taken for granted, our sense of security, our sense of stability—all gone. Of course we’re fucking insecure.
In times of uncertainty, it’s human nature to close ranks, to revert to clannishness and tribalism because that is the quickest and easiest way to figure out who is safe. In the days before social media, that would have been our immediate community—our friends, our family members, those we interact with on a daily basis and with whom we share society.
But now…we sort ourselves along moral lines.
And let me be clear, it’s a false morality. It’s moral posturing, not any deeply held belief, that binds us together. The performance of the correct ideology, the correct adherence to groupthink, the correct gestures and markers of righteousness. Social media doesn’t help either. Now we can self-sort, filter out contrasting viewpoints, allow the algorithm to serve us personalized content that doesn’t challenge us.
I have my own ideas about right and wrong, of course, and a lot of bigotry espoused by the people around me is personal—personal against my race, my ethnicity, my sexuality, my gender identity, my mental illness, my neurodivergence, my disabilities, etc. And yet. And yet. None of that bigotry is personal, or rather, most of that bigotry is not personalized to me. That doesn’t excuse the bigotry, but it does make it easier for me to take it at face value. To shrug off the offense and continue to troll.
But it’s harder to do that with those I consider my own.
I have a problem with Orson Scott Card.
And that problem is that I not only like his work, but found them at a deeply formative part of my reading life.
It’s not something I necessarily feel comfortable admitting in certain company, and by certain company, I mean my peers. The left-leaning, largely college-educated, (mostly) well-intentioned, generally middle class members of the literati with whom I share publishing spaces. My own, as it were. My people. The ones with whom I close ranks in times of uncertainty.
Because what does it say about me that I know just what a horrid person Orson Scott Card is and still find meaning in his work?
My very first Card novel was Speaker for the Dead, which I read in my early 20s. I had obviously heard of Ender’s Game before—in fact, it was one of those “suggested optional reads” on my summer reading lists in middle school, but I never read it, preferring to read Rebecca and I Capture the Castle instead. But my roommate at the time loved the Ender books, and because I trusted her taste in books, I read Speaker for the Dead.
To say that this book was life-changing for me is both an understatement and hyperbole. At its core, Speaker for the Dead is about empathy, about striving to understand the other—the literal alien—about making reparations to those you have wronged, and to love someone where they are.
It seems so at odds with the persona Orson Scott Card has come to be.
Rereading these books now, I can see the seeds of his bigotry, especially in the unrelenting heterocissexuality that runs rampant through these stories. But none of it is overt, or even—I think—conscious. There are passing mentions of queer identities, and while I suspect some deep-seated, subconscious bias, the main characters textually accept the “other” at face value.
None of the subsequent books in the Ender saga ever reach the emotional impact of Speaker, especially as the very concept of a “Speaker for the Dead” as it exists in these books is an act of atonement on Ender’s part. After causing the genocide of the Bugger race, Ender travels the universe in search of a new world for the Bugger Queen to repopulate her people. During his travels, he acts as a Speaker for the Dead for the various colonies, telling the stories of the lives of the deceased without judgement, the good and the bad altogether. What is a Speaker for the Dead but a someone who gives voice to a stranger, to make them human and whole before your eyes? What a beautiful demonstration—no, celebration—of empathy.
This notion of empathy—as an act of transforming both the reviled and the adored into a person with complexities and nuance—was profound. Too often I think we think of empathy as the ability to relate to another, but to be honest, that’s too simplistic of an understanding of empathy. That reading of empathy leads us into the trap of believing we can only empathize with fictional characters who resemble ourselves because how can we “relate” to people unlike us?
Do we see the problem here?
As of this writing, about three publishing Twitter Discourses™ ago, there was an ongoing brouhaha about “comps,” or "comparative titles” in the industry. I have my own thoughts about comps in general as both a former editor and an author, but what caught my attention was how the conversation quickly became focused on the usage of identities as comps. As in, there would be no comp for a queer BIPOC fantasy with X disability because no such book exists. (I’m keeping the example as purposefully vague as possible.) To me, that is not only a misguided understanding of how comps are used within the industry, but also a reductionist view of one’s own creative work. To reduce one’s artistic output to one’s own marginalizations is not only shortsighted, but devalues the reader’s capacity for empathy.
Of course, this false notion of empathy doesn’t come from nowhere. The higher ups in publishing reduce absolutely everything to margins in a profit-and-loss statement, taking the barest, most simplistic reading of data and extrapolating conclusions about potential success in bad faith. But nothing disheartens me more than seeing members of my own “group”—my people—do the work of gatekeeping for those in power. We unwittingly become enforcers of a status quo when we buy into ideas about identity-as-comps, when we police each other about the “right” way to be queer, to be brown, to be disabled, etc.
All cops are bastards.
Even when we are the cops.
욱! (Ugh!) is one of my favorite BTS songs, not only because it’s hype af, but also because it gets right to the heart of the bad faith epidemic that plagues us. This song came out in early 2020, and the problem has only gotten worse. I always think of Suga’s sarcastic bars—
이곳에선 모두가 도덕적 사고와 판단이 완벽한 사람이 돼
웃기시네
Here everyone's real ethical, perfect judgment
How hilarious, farcical
—but the deeper we get into this atmosphere of bad faith, the more I think of RM’s verse where he compares this misguided anger—this outrage (분노, boon-no)—with human waste (분뇨, boon-nyo). With sewage.
분뇨, 무관심 너넨 팀이야
Human waste, indifference, you’re a team.
In other words, outrage and indifference go hand in hand.
The problem with bad faith is not only that it’s malicious, but it’s also a way for us to avoid accountability. It feels better to get riled up over the online moral fracas du jour than to do any of the meaningful labor to actually improve things for real people. At best, it’s a way for us to engage in bare minimum performative activism that is functionally useless; at worst, this outrage impulse can be exploited by those with less-than-honorable intentions.
And this is the real, true danger of this culture of bad faith we’re living in. That we cannot take anyone at face value, that we must always be suspicious of another’s intentions lest they turn out to be yet another milkshake duck, that we cannot trust each other. If we cannot trust we each other, we cannot build coalition, community, or change. Bad faith only begets bad faith, a toxic ouroboros that can’t be broken except by grace.
I think about grace a lot.
I’m an atheist, but I was raised Christian and I live in a western society heavily informed by white Christianity. When I mention grace, I’m really talking about the concept in a spiritual context, not as an synonym for elegance or goodwill. Growing up, I was always told that we were saved by God’s grace, that he loved us despite our unworthiness. As a child, I had no real understanding of what that meant, but as an adult who is no longer Christian, I think I have a better handle on the notion.
To meet someone where they are, at face value, without judgement, with neither condemnation nor absolution, is grace.
As with the concept of empathy, I think the idea of grace gets simplified these days. If to empathize with someone is to relate to them, then to give someone grace is to make excuses for their behavior. But I don’t think that’s true; you can give someone grace while still holding them accountable for their behavior. The way Orson Scott Card can simultaneously be a horrid person who writes about the profundity of empathy. The way bigotry against anyone not white, cis, able-bodied, or heterosexual can be both personal yet not personalized.
The poet John Keats once wrote in a letter to his brothers about a conversation he had about art and a state of mind he termed negative capability, that is, “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” I can hold two contrasting thoughts in my head at once without cognitive dissonance because I can let myself exist in a state of negative capability. Funnily enough, I first came across this concept not in a college class about Keats, but in The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman when I was 12. If we could learn how to better exist in states of negative capability, then maybe grace and empathy would come easier to us all.
But there are other obstacles to be considered. The fact that we don’t really understand what it means to be accountable for anything is one. What does accountability look like when someone violates the moral codes we’ve placed upon ourselves? This is the question posed by cancel culture that no one seems to be able to answer. What is accountability? Is it punishment? Is it reparations? And does accountability allow room for actual growth and change?
I don’t have any answers, not really. Only more questions, and an existence where I hold all the uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts together, without justification and without judgement.
I wish I could say Buster’s human is more thoughtful, measured, or any way less bigoted when I see him next, but he isn’t. I knew he wouldn’t be, but I also didn’t think I would change his mind with one conversation. We exchange pleasantries the next time our paths cross, the talk between us still easygoing and friendly.
“That’s right,” he coos at Castor, who jumps up to cover his face with kisses despite my admonitions. “How’s my sweet boy?”
“An asshole,” I say. “He’s learned the power of saying no to me like the teenager he is.”
Buster’s human laughs. “He’ll grow out of it,” he assures me. “We all do.”
“Do we?” I ask lightly. “I don’t think I’ve changed much since I was a teen.”
“Well maybe that’s why you write for them.” Buster’s human gives my dog a vigorous belly rub, much to Castor’s delight. “You still remember what it’s like. You’re still young.”
“I’m thirty-seven.”
“No shit?” He eyes me in surprise. “You don’t look it. But then again, I hear Asians don’t show age like the rest of us.” After a split second, he looks contrite. “Sorry, was that racist?”
I smile. “Yes. But it’s okay. I’ll tell you the secret to eternal youth.” I lean forward conspiratorially. “It’s sunscreen. And soy products.”
“Doesn’t that stuff have estrogen though?” He looks skeptical.
“So does dairy.” I shrug. “So, what will it be, sir? Eternal youth? Or sex hormones in your food? Honestly maybe you should worry about Big Farming instead of the trans agenda.”
It takes Buster’s human a moment to realize I’m teasing him, but instead of getting riled up, he meets me where I am. “We all make our choices, I guess.”
Choices. I think about the choices I make every time we share the dog park together. I could choose to call him out more directly on his terrible beliefs. I could try to change his mind. I could bully him into losing every argument with reasoned logic. But what I know I can’t do is convince him of the humanity of the other with words; I can only encourage him to empathize by socializing together. By simply existing, I challenge his preconceived notions and nudge him into a state of negative capability.
“We do indeed,” I say, calling my dogs back to me. “We do indeed.”
credits
Downtown Glow by Ghostrifter Official | Music promoted by https://www.chosic.com/free-music/all/
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
I Walk With Ghosts by Scott Buckley | Music promoted by https://www.chosic.com/free-music/all/
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
욱! by 방탄소년단
Produced by Supreme Boi
Written by Supreme Boi, Suga, RM, Hiss Noise, J-Hope, Icecream Drum
BTS Black Swan Lofi by smyang