As I've said before, the best thing about the otherwise essentially disastrous Back to the Future Part III is the moral: that the best way to deal with violent bullies is to call them assholes and walk away.
I find this notion particularly appealing because I'm no good at it [see also]; I mean, I'm getting way better, but I'm still not there. If I think someone is being an asshole, I want to be able to say, "He's an asshole," and walk away, but there's this strong drive to engage, to correct, or, at the very least, to report. Marty McFly does turn to the other people in the bar and announce that "Mad Dog" Tannen is an asshole, but he doesn't feel he has to prove it: when someone does something obnoxious, I feel I have to make sure everyone agrees that it was obnoxious—which arguably misses the whole point. We have to be OK with the fact that some people are assholes. Assholery will never be eradicated from the earth, nor is it our job to combat it, really.
But I wonder: is this a fantasy? I remember reading Nietszche in college and being blown away—this may actually have been one of the first-ever times that I came across one of those ideas that are simultaneously sort of unacceptable but also probably in and of themselves arguably true—by the idea that Judaeo-Christian morality is a kind of "slave morality" based on justifying weakness and failure: that only someone who got beaten up all the time would come up with a rule like "beating people up is wrong." Let me be clear: (1) I may be getting this idea wrong, and (2) I don't really think it's so. However, I think it's—how would you say this?—valid? tough to argue with?
Point being... Q. Is the feeling of triumph in not fighting a Tannen and instead just announcing, "He's an asshole!"* essentially a fake-out, a cop-out, or a dressed-up wimp-out? Q. Is it possible that, rather than (or at least in addition to) a kind of moral victory, this sort of thing is effectively an excuse for failure?
I mean, I'm playing devil's advocate, here, but isn't the "asshole" gambit one that only someone too weak to fight would pull out? If Marty had been a better gunfighter, couldn't he have just gone out there and shot the pistol out of Buford's hand (if he didn't really want to hurt him)? If he had been a better drag racer, couldn't he have beaten
"No, no, physical force is always better with Nazis."
Honestly I'm ambivalent (which, you may recall, means "of both minds"). I believe in right and wrong, as neither absolute nor absolutely relative terms,† and I do think that using violence to resolve disagreements is—you know what? Let's say inhuman, or subhuman, or at least, like, "a low and rather disappointing, unsatisfactory version of human." In other words, I don't really think that it's better or even comparably good to beat somebody up or shoot him: I do think that's a moral failure. It's just that the opposing viewpoint isn't entirely easy to reject out of hand, which may mean that there's some third path...‡
Anyway, the fact that "Mad Dog" Tannen surely couldn't articulate this objection himself is itself possibly somewhat telling. Or—I don't know, maybe not. I just remembered writing that thing about being outraged at a dog for barking at you. Maybe the trick of it is that people who solve problems with physical violence need to be understood like wild animals: you neither blame a tiger for attacking you nor attribute human moral sense to it.
There: I just dehumanized bullies and assholes. All in a day's work, folks!
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* Which, by the way, the movie didn't even really follow through with: see "55 reasons why Back to the Future Part III is one of the worst sequels ever made," reasons 46 and 48).
† You know who helped me get to a place where I felt reasonably confident about this? Old Erich Fromm. Might be about time again for me to bust out Man for Himself.
‡ Like Luke Skywalker, who's neither Sith nor quite traditionally Jedi (nerds, go here).
5 comments:
Q. Is the feeling of triumph in not fighting a Tannen and instead just announcing, "He's an asshole!"* essentially a fake-out, a cop-out, or a dressed-up wimp-out?
It's a fantasy. For humans, it's the ultimate argumentative fantasy, that I could say "[three words]" and everyone would nod and agree and that would be that. Check out a Yahoo!* Sports debate sometime, where the answer to a complex column on the ethics of oversigning (then pulling scholarships) elicits the response "Ur just jelleus. Saban is THE MAN! ROLL TIDE!"
That's the problem with the penetrating three-word answer. Anyone can say "he's an asshole" and believe that's a perfect and concise description of the situation. But people all think differently -- there are many of our fellow Americans who think people who try to intellectualize BttF are assholes -- so the way to reach a greater consensus is to describe things not as you see them but as your audience might see them.
"He's an asshole" = "Sticks and stones..." It is essentially a lesson for kids who are better off learning to leave people with their opinions rather than challenge everyone to come to a consensus. Knowing when it is appropriate to challenge or attempt to change the thinking and behavior of others is advanced adult shit, and beyond the capacity of most adults. In the U.S. South, it is culturally rude to continue an argument once it is established that there is disagreement; that society has adopted it as maxim because so few people can do it responsibly that it's not worth having arguments, period.
I call it fantasy because in real life there isn't a family of Tannens who will genetically become as antagonizing as their respective civilizations allow. In real life, Seamus McFly wants to kill off the endangered California Desert Cave Bear because the bear is making homesteading more difficult, and the guy peddling barbed wire wants to protect Cave Bears because he wants his grandchildren to be able to enjoy the California Desert Cave Bear -- and rather than weigh these needs against each other while taking each others' viewpoints into account, both parties are much more likely to shrug and say "He's an asshole."
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* The exclamation point in their name is one example of how clever marketing people make life hell on copy editors.
That's not really what I meant, though. I think the title I chose (at the last minute, on a whim) is misleading: I'm not asking whether "He's an asshole" will be effective in any pragmatic way, whether it will change the world or vanquish your enemy—whether it works well as an "offense," as I put it in the careless title—but rather whether it's a triumph in a larger sense, in the "higher-ground" sense.
A better way for me to have phrased the whole question would sort of be: "Is acknowledging (to yourself) that someone is being a jerk and not feeling that you have to fight him a sign of moral or characterological strength or a sign of physical or (again) characterological weakness?"
WTH - My comment keeps getting deleted here.
Mispogon, not sure what's going on here. I've gotten e-mail notification a couple times about your having posted something—haven't gotten to read it yet—but, yeah, it seems like it's not staying up for some reason. If it keeps happening, I could probably post it myself for you.
Sent it to e-mail.
Gawrd forbid I ever need to reply to you on a "Fuck this Ad" for masculine increasement
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