My last essay, Jive Talking, said that my identity is a living construct made by me and the people around me, including you.  Your judgments determine who I am (in part). William James said that “the deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.”  I want to be considered worthy in your eyes, and I fear your negative judgment, and you feel the same about me.  Judgment is personal, and we crave the positive and fear the negative. 

 

I once knew a malevolent man, now deceased, who had the animal intelligence to find the weakness in others and judge them harshly for it.  His judgments were accurate, more or less, given the nature of the lens through which he viewed people.  This man’s judgment could have been a painful constraint on me.  But I am freedom and constraint bound together, and my freedom is my response to gaze.

 

In my freedom, I had various responses available to me, for example, I could stay far away from the malevolent man.  Or I could make a first-strike judgment against him and thereby judge and dismiss him before he could get to me.  Or I could try to gain his approval, although with this particular man, that would just signal weakness.  All of these responses are It-relations, because I act to control and manipulate.

 

Could I have responded to the malevolent man as Thou?  As between two people, one-to-one, a straightforward and strong response to gaze is to accept judgment and still call Thou.  In my heart I say, “judge me as you please, and if your judgment is negative, I’m strong enough to live with it and even improve myself because of it, so thankyou.”  From strength, I call him Thou and that changes everything.  Malevolent, yes, but still a man.

 

What about group gaze?  That’s more complex and more scary.  I recall an article entitled, Havel and the Ideological Temptation, by Flagg Taylor from Law & Liberty, July 30, 2020.  The article told a story about a white woman in Washington DC who showed up at a Halloween party in blackface, in a business suit with a name tag that read, “Hello, my name is Megyn Kelly.”  The party was for DC insiders on the left side of the political divide.  The blackface woman intended by her costume to make fun of Ms. Kelly, who inhabits space on the right.  Earlier, Ms. Kelly had made some remark on TV saying that back in the day, it was OK to dress in blackface so long as you made it clear you were in character, just pretending. 

 

The blackface woman expected that her friends would know that she really wasn’t in blackface, that she was just pretending to be that bad Ms. Kelly.  She expected her friends would laugh and say, how smart and cool you are!  Nope.  The group saw a white woman in blackface and excommunicated her.  Yikes!  That’s a nightmare worse than wearing your underwear in public.  That’s like walking naked into the lions’ cage, slathered in bacon fat, and saying to the lions, “look fellas, I’m pretending to be a pig, isn’t this funny?”

 

Blackface woman tried to gain approval by ridiculing the Other, but she got othered instead.  It’s easy for me to say she got what she deserved, but what if blackface woman was my sister?  Not so easy to laugh now.

 

I have a weekly Zoom call with my siblings, and sometimes my sister, A1, who is a true artist, reads her poetry to us.  And sometimes A1 writes from the point-of-view of a fictional character called “Sadie,” who lives far on the other side of the political divide.  My sister, in these select poems, channels the Other, and we siblings, the decent people of this side of the political divide, are terrified of the words coming out of her mouth.

 

A1 doesn’t talk about the Other’s perspective, nor does she make a caricature of or belittle the Other.  Instead, my sister becomes the real Sadie and speaks in her voice.  What courage! What artistic empathy!  When my sister becomes Sadie, she reaches to understand the Other as Thou.  And what do we siblings do?  We silence the artist.  We tell A1 to keep the Sadie poems private for fear that her friends might shun her based on their mistaken belief that A1 really is Sadie instead of just pretending.

 

Why do we that?  Love and fear; and both are justified.  We love our sister and fear for her.  A group isn’t a one-to-one I-and-Thou relationship; there’s no Thou with a mob.  The problem with groups is that we, together, can exclude any individual member and thereby make him Other and convict him by our gaze and gossip and silence.  It’s entirely reasonable to fear the negative judgment of the group.

 

What’s my proper response to group gaze?  I start by accepting that all groups in which I participate will objectify, as It, certain aspects of my identity.  I am something in the eyes of my fellow group members, maybe something as boring and benign as what I do for a living, or more likely nowadays, the group’s perception of my politics.  I accept that I will be judged, and at the same time, I enter Thou relation when and where I can, and I’m grateful for the blessings thereof.  Above all, I respect the power of the group, which means that I speak my truth when I can get away with it, but mostly I keep my big, fat mouth shut.  I play my role, be the best me I can be, and learn to live in gaze.

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