Hugo Schwyzer

I’m on hiatus until August 29. Some reprints will appear occasionally until then. Given that the John Edwards adultery story has been confirmed today, I’m reposting some thoughts I had up earlier this year, on March 11, when the Elliot Spitzer case broke.

As we await what must be the inevitable resignation announcement from Eliot Spitzer, it occurs to me I’ve posted a few times on the all-too-well-known theme of a fall from grace on the part of an admired — invariably male — public figure. Here’s a selection:

Private virtue, public justice: some very long thoughts on men, leadership, and the lie of “compartmentalism”

“There Never Was a War that Was Not Inward”: a long reflection on Ted Haggard

“The inner darkness of the redeemed”: in defense of Mel Gibson

Lengthy musings about Clinton, feminism, erotic justice

The titles of these posts are sufficiently descriptive as to require no further explanation. What I’ve said about Bill Clinton, Antonio Villaraigosa, Ted Haggard and Mel Gibson (an odd quartet indeed) more or less applies to Eliot Spitzer. And the bookers from the major chat shows have already called up the legion of pop psychologists who appear at times like this, all proffering an answer to the timeless question: “Why would a man like X, in his position, with so much going for him, do something so monumentally stupid?” By now we know all the answers: sexual addiction; deep-seated shame and the desire to be punished; self-destructiveness; mid-life crises; good, old-fashioned hubris. And because falls from grace are often breathtaking in their suddenness, we are fascinated as the ancients were fascinated. These are, as everyone points out, very old stories.

I’ve been tiresome, frankly, in my insistence that men are called to match their language to their lives. (Cripes, I use that phrase so often, I ought to pledge to give it a rest until after the next president is inaugurated.) If you click on the four posts linked above, I generally make the same point over and over again: we are called to resist compartmentalization. Both feminism and Christianity, I think, call human beings to wholeness, congruence, and radical integrity. Both call us to “erotic justice”. From my 2004 Clinton post:

My goal as a feminist man is not merely to treat women as my political, economic and social equals, nor even to help other men treat women in that same way. With the help of many mentors and friends of both sexes, my goal for myself is to live a life of what progressive theologian Marvin Ellison calls “Erotic Justice”. Erotic justice means refusing to reduce another human being to the status of an object which exists for one’s own pleasure. For so many men, discipling the libido is one of the hardest struggles of their lives. A commitment to erotic justice is a commitment to engage in that disciplining, even when it is immensely difficult. Erotic justice is not, however, just exercising self-control. It is the conscious effort to transform one’s sexuality so that it loses its capacity to wound, to alienate, to objectify. It does not mean the end of erotic excitement — it is just the insistence that the truly erotic is incompatible with injustice. To put it mildly, it’s a long journey.

But we all have goals, and in one way or another, we all fall short — me included. And though we can all agree that it is best not to slip in the first place, I’m thinking this morning about how we deal with those folks (governors, pastors, fathers, professors, husbands) who do fall. Lynn Gazis-Sax has a great post up today on just this subject: Public Figures, Private Sin. Lynn reminds us that failure in one area of life, however grievious, doesn’t completely cancel out the good that was done in another; speaking of everyone from Bill Clinton to Dr. King, she notes that “whatever is good in their public record doesn’t suddenly become bad because they were unfaithful.” That’s true too.

The title of this post comes from a line attributed to Thomas Merton. Salvation is worked out on earth by men and women who are deeply flawed, and to say otherwise is to deny the reality of our humanness. No matter what, we are not, in this life, going to “be perfect as (our) heavenly father is perfect.” That doesn’t mean surrendering to our worst impulses with a shrug, blaming our lack of self-control on a defect that we cannot hope to control. It doesn’t mean turning a blind eye to injustice in any form — and yes, infidelity is injustice, prostitution is injustice, deception is injustice. No excuses. But every last one of us is going to fall short in one area or another, though usually not as spectacularly as Eliot Spitzer has fallen this week. If only those who weren’t hypocrites were capable of changing the world for the better, the world would be far bleaker than it is.

In the face of another disappointing, sad, revelation of human brokenness, we’ve got to avoid two pitfalls. The first is to overreact with an outrage so deep that we overlook the positive contributions that have been made — and may still be made — by he or she who has fallen. The second mistake is to suggest that the good the miscreant has done is so great that it cancels out the failing, and that we “shouuldn’t judge a private matter.” We ought to judge injustice and dishonesty in others as well as in ourselves; these universal human failings are no less heartbreaking for their universality. People aren’t going to be perfect, but they can amend their lives and become better when held to account. At the same time, no sin is so great that it completely nullifies the very real good that we can also do. Public justice doesn’t excuse private misbehavior; private misbehavior doesn’t mean that the public justice done didn’t matter.

God writes straight with crooked lines. I am crooked, Eliot Spitzer is crooked, and most of the people I’ve met in my life are crooked to one degree or another. My two favorite figures from Scripture — King David and Simon Peter — were men of often disastrous impulsiveness. They blew it, time and again; in the former’s case, “blowing it” entailed not only adultery but murder. And yet, and yet, and yet, God worked out His plan through these obviously flawed human beings. It’s good to remember that.

I think Eliot Spitzer ought to resign; it doesn’t seem possible for him to remain in office. But I also think a man of his talents and his convictions still has much good to do in this world. His first order of business is taking total responsibility for what he has done and facing whatever consequences are to come. His public reputation is in tatters, and the trust of his family is broken. To put it vulgarly, he fucked up big-time, and big-time fuck-ups need time to overcome. But if he walks through this with determination and brutal honesty and a real desire for redemption, amazing things will happen for him.

I’m on hiatus until August 29. I’m reprinting old favorite posts. This post originally appeared in October 2005.

I’ve been reflecting on the simple words "Don’t look."

Not long ago, I was walking through Old Town Pasadena with a group of my Wednesday night All Saints teens.  We passed two homeless men slumped against a wall.  Neither was aggressively panhandling, though they did have a cap upside down on sidewalk in front of them with some small change inside.  As we approached, I heard one of my girls say to her friend "Don’t look, those guys are really disgusting."  They quickened their pace and dropped their heads and hurried on.   Since we were out on a small, informal, but nonetheless "church-approved" outing, I should have spoken up right away.  I didn’t, however, and that was my mistake.

Our selfish instincts tell us that there are many things from which we ought to avert our gaze.   Homeless people, for one.  Dead animals by the side of the road.  The sick, the needy, the unattractive.  From the time most of us are children, we’re taught that it’s okay, even appropriate, to turn away from the reality of human and animal suffering.  Most of us don’t want to see what the cow goes through in order to become our burger.  Most don’t want to see how my beloved chinchillas die to become coats.  We don’t want to see the weeping parents in Pakistan, the desperate and starving children in Niger.  These images will upset us, discomfit us, challenge us — and we don’t like that.

My mother regularly gives to a wide variety of charities.  She’s long been a steady contributor to Amnesty International and other human rights agencies.  But she hates seeing the terrible pictures often enclosed in their mailings to her, pictures of human beings who have been horribly mistreated as prisoners of conscience.  She often says, jokingly, "I’d give them more money if they’d stop sending me those awful photos!"  She wants to give, but she doesn’t want to see.  I understand; my wife and I get an extraordinary number of solicitations from animal rights organizations, usually filled with images of abused and malnourished dogs, horses, seals, and other creatures.  And I have a hard time looking at all that suffering.

At the same time that we are told not to look at the reality of human and animal pain, we are encouraged to look at images that degrade and exploit the human person.  We do live in an increasingly porn-saturated culture, a point that commenters across the political spectrum have made with growing concern.  It matters little whether we’re talking about the demure Playmate in Hefner’s monthly, or the raunchy images found on a "bukkake fetish" website, we live in a society that is increasingly tolerant, even enthusiastic, about looking at the exposed bodies of (mostly) young and (mostly) economically vulnerable women.  What our forebears couldn’t look at (because porn, while very much extant, was not nearly as available) or wouldn’t look at (out of a sense, however incomplete, of religious morality), we gaze at and consume with an ever-increasing degree of comfort and nonchalance.

And as with pornography, so, of course, with violence.  In television, film, and increasingly in interactive video games, young people seem to have no problem viewing an extrarordinary number of killings.  The same folks who can’t stomach watching a cow slaughtered for food have no problem playing Grand Theft Auto, or sitting through "Saw" and similar bloody epics at the cineplex.  Looking at faked violence, like looking at the artificial and falsified sex in most pornography, is much easier than gazing at real suffering, particularly when encountering real suffering and real exploitation might make a moral claim on us to take action.

So I’ve come to a conclusion about my spiritual journey.   God is calling me to see, and respond to, the very things that those around me tell me I ought not to look at.   God is calling me to look at the homeless man on the street, look him in the eye, and whether I can give him the help he needs or not, at the very least acknowledge him as my brother.  I am called to look at how the food I eat is prepared, and not turn away my gaze from the reality of the slaughterhouse.   Reminding myself of the smell and the sight of slaughter helps keep me away from meat when I’m tempted, let me tell you!  I must look at the images of suffering in Pakistan, Iraq, Louisiana, and Darfur, even though looking makes me uncomfortable.  Whenever humanly possible, I must respond to what I see with compassionate action.  But if I can do nothing, even then I still must look; in the end, the last thing we can do is, if nothing else, serve as witnesses to the reality of the suffering of our fellow creatures.  At the very least, we won’t be ignoring their pain.

And just as I am called to look at what I don’t want to see, I am called to turn away from what I do want very much to look at!  Over and over again, many times a day, I find myself challenged to avert my eyes.  Each day, I make the conscious choice not to look at porn.   Each day, I make the conscious choice not to objectify those whose bodies are a click or two away from being on display on my computer screen.  Each day, I remind myself that my eyes are tools to help me see the reality of God’s creation.   My eyes are here to help me see those whom I am called to serve, and to see those who I am called to love.  They are here to make me more compassionate.  Visual porn in any form may please me, but it also inoculates me against the reality of the personhood of the woman at whose body I am gazing.  It distracts me from where it is I ought to be directing my sexual energy.  And it makes me a little more selfish, a little colder, and a little less human.

Jesus often is fond of turning conventional wisdom on its head.  He’ll often begin a talk by saying "You have heard… but I say to you…"  What I hear Jesus saying to me at this stage of my journey is that I need to see the very things my friends and family and culture tell me I ought not to look at.   And I need to turn my eyes away from the very things that my society encourages me to delight in gazing upon.

I’m on hiatus until August 29, but am posting reprints of old popular posts. This post appeared September 28, 2006.

I was talking with a young woman who works as an aide to a colleague of mine.  She’s 19, and has a boyfriend the same age.  "He cheated on me", she blurted out to my colleague and me yesterday; "We broke up."  We made vaguely soothing noises, and listened to her story as best we could.  One part in particular struck me:

"He told me he can’t be faithful right now.  He’s got too many ‘wild oats’ to sow."

And this made me realize I’ve never posted about "wild oats."  Doing five minutes of quick Internet research reveals that the expression "sowing wild oats" to refer to reckless, usually promiscuous behavior on the part of young men, goes back to at least the 17th century.  And while many old-fashioned phrases have vanished from the idiom of today’s college-age population, most of them are quite familiar with the "wild oats" notion.

The popular "wild oats" thesis is basically this: young men (usually in their late teens and twenties), have an enormous amount of sexual and creative energy.  (Depending on whom you talk to, this is attributed to their "essential masculine nature" or "testosterone" or the "Y chromosome".)  It is natural and good and right for men in this age bracket to be a bit wild, a bit irresponsible, and to be unwilling to make enduring commitments.  Those who love them — and are wounded by the carelessness of young oat sowers –are given the cold comfort of being told "Sooner or later, they grow out of it.  They just have to get them (the oats?) out of their system."

I’ve noticed that the "wild oats" theory is closely linked to the "get it all out of your system" idea.  The latter notion is that we men have a finite amount of "wildness" within us.  After we’ve sown our oats for three years, or five, or ten, we’ll be "done."  After we’ve slept with 5 women, or 25,  or 250, we’ll presumably be "all out of oats" and ready to settle down into monogamy and responsibility.

There are a couple of things I loathe about this theory.  One, women rarely get to use the "wild oats" excuse.  Teenage and twenty-something women who exhibit reckless or sexually adventurous behavior get shamed as sluts. Since we all "know" that "women don’t really have wild oats", a woman who behaves as if she does is "unnatural", "perverse", a "whore."

Now, I spent a fair amount of time on a ranch growing up.  I know a bit about oats.  Men don’t have them, women don’t have them — be they wild or genetically modified, oats are not found in the human body unless they enter through the mouth and get processed through the digestive tract.  Now, both men and women — particularly when young — have adventurous spirits.  Both men and women have strong sex drives, though we tend to want to deny that women’s libidos make much of an appearance before 32.  But nobody got no "oats" no how. (Not to mention that by definition, “wild” oats aren’t going to be sown anyway).

Continue reading ‘Reprint: A lengthy musing about sowing wild oats’