(sketchy, and rambling both)

There is something about being uncompromising, particularly when applied to historical figures, that seems heroic to us.   My father certainly saw it as weakness to compromise about non-negotiable things.  Backing down from a moral position was something he saw as a deep personal failing and something he could not bear.  This gave him a tendency, in spite of the keen appreciation of nuance and subtlety that was also a big part of his make-up, to be absolutist about his beliefs.  

This created a tension he could not resolve, except by clinging to his belief in the right.  On a fundamental level, he saw the choice as simple: my way or the highway.  To his credit he did come to regret this simplistic stance as he was dying.  

“Well, the world’s not really like that, Elie,” he said weakly but with conviction when I reminded him of his black and white positions throughout his life.

In the days after WWII when colonialism was collapsing and the phrase ‘self-determination’ gained currency in discussions of human rights, itself also a new concept, it was thought, by some scholarly type I read in college, that the highest form of human freedom was possessed by a man willing to die for his beliefs.  

This strikes us as a sickening idea today, when men willing to die for their beliefs are also eager to kill for them, and not only that, but kill as many innocents as they can take with them.  This is what black and white thinking leads to, somehow:  the right to live without being blown up by a fanatic confers the right to blow up anyone who might have any possible connection, or even no connection at all, to anyone who might blow people up.

This is the cul du sac that the supremely human idiocy of black and white thinking ultimately drives one into.  While fair accommodation and a willingness to compromise are key steps to improving most things, the idea of principled compromise, which actually takes greater strength than absolutist thinking,  has acquired a stink.  

I’m not referring to the kind of poisonous compromise made between slaveholders and their fellow drafters of the charter of modern human liberty, though it was probably the best the parties could agree to at the time.  I’m referring to any compromise to resolve a real-world problem in today’s climate of “political” intolerance and anger.  The compromises between loved ones, for example, struck for the sake of getting along.

The false dichotomy of either/or is almost always the way things are phrased in our winner/loser society, it often seems impossible to resist.  Boots on the ground, or drones?   This bowl of stinking shit or that one?    You’re for us or against us, you love our freedom or you hate our freedom, you see the world as it is or you see it the way you want it to be.   A genius gets to think outside the box, the rest of you morons, pick the side of the box you want to huddle in and fight it out amongst yourselves.

I recall the moment when my father tore the bonds of affection between us, using this idiotic dualistic technique.  It was at the dinner table, I must have been in high school, perhaps Junior High, when he brought up the odd either/or hypothetical:  would you rather be loved or respected?  

The senseless hypothetical hung in the air for a moment while I wondered about this arbitrary and stupid choice.  Why only one?  How could a father think one possible without the other?   I remember looking at my sister as the answer was about to come.  My father then chose the wrong one.

“I’d rather be respected,” he said, and I recall my great disappointment, even disgust.  Sacrificing love for respect did not seem a remotely respectable thing to do.  I felt the love torn once more and, as for respect, there was little question of that choice being respected.  Years later I’d see this same choice illustrated starkly, in a book I never read, by Machiavelli.

In The Prince (1513) Machiavelli describes the characteristics of a leader:  

One ought to be both feared and loved, but, as it is difficult for the two to go together, it is much safer to be feared than loved, if one of the two has to be wanting …. men have less scruple in offending one who makes himself loved than one who makes himself feared.  For love is held by chain of obligation which, men being selfish, is broken whenever it serves their purposes, but fear is maintained by dread of punishment which never fails.  Never.  

This may be good advice to a prince leading a principality during a time of war among city states, but to a father?  It is safer to be feared, and easier to gain respect, perhaps, but the fearless make themselves vulnerable, no?    Can a person who wants to be safe above all ever be respectable?

My father once exploited aspects of this fear/respect thing, and a shifty black and white dichotomy, to rob me and my girlfriend, visiting from far away, of a stolen night of blissful young romance.  I should never have let the old bastard talk to her, not that I could have stopped him, she was flattered and spellbound.  The talk went on and in the kitchen, as I watched, sickened, as he amiably took our night of love apart piece by piece.  

He charmed her as he convinced the young woman who was about to stay the night at our house, a girl I was crazy about and looking very much forward to sneaking into bed with as soon as everyone was asleep, that while his son (me) was not immoral, I was amoral, choosing to make moral stands, or not, as circumstances demanded.   From here, putting our make-out session into an arbitrary moral zone, it was a short step to steeling her to take a principled stand for chastity, which she later did, and not allow herself to be manipulated by an amoral person, like myself.  This is one of the most gratuitously asshole moves my father ever made to directly torpedo my happiness and optimism about life.

It’s hard to care very much about the abstraction of a fight, unless you have a beautiful dog in that fight that you love very much.  I had a very beautiful dog in that fight that night, and the bout went to my father, unanimously, but why was there even a fight to be fought?