Assholes, Angels & Objectivity header

This is where you expect me to tell you there are two kinds of people in the world, but why would I try to pass off that same stale lie? We’re all identical and you can guess which category we gravitate towards! Unquestionably, what I believe tells you a lot more about me than it does about the world because, even if I weren’t biased towards my own perspective, I’ve only been exposed to the tiniest fraction of the world population, not to mention all those historical billions who fell victim to entropy before I ever came along.

Backstory
In the mid-1970’s, I was studying Journalism at the University of Texas. UT’s Department of Communication was a great school. In fact, it was the school where Walter Cronkite got his diploma. It was also the school where Captain Kangeroo graduated, so you see, there’s always a balance if you just look for it.

Apart from the checkered history of the school, there were some great journalism professors. Three of my professors had been young Dallas Times Herald reporters in the vehicle three cars behind President Kennedy on that fateful day in 1963. Those guys had some real-life experience, and if you could sum up all their teaching in a single word, it would be “objectivity”. They insisted that genuine objectivity was the heart of journalism.

But even as a naïve undergraduate, I understood objectivity was a pipedream. What I knew from personal experience, but didn’t yet have a suitable moniker for, was “confirmation bias” — that all-consuming desire to interpret information in a way which bolsters our deepest self-image needs. And if you think for a minute that there’s anything approaching objectivity in today’s profit-driven media, I’d gently but firmly remind you of all those polls you believed, running up to the most recent presidential election.

So, I’m guilty of it. You’re guilty of it. Your spouse, your boss, your preacher, and your psychoanalyst are all guilty of it, but what does that have to do with the title of this little tale? I love to strive for objectivity, even while understanding that it’s an impossible goal, but mostly, I strive for an objective understanding of who it is that lives in my body. I’m not trying to deeply understand your issues because I can barely understand my own, but maybe, just maybe, some of the stuff that’s true about me might also be at least partially true about you.

There are two milestones which determined the way I think and, by extension, how I act. I’ll grant you there was much life leading up to each milestone and much reinterpretation and internal negotiation following each milestone but in essence, there have only been two really big forks in the road to be navigated (so far).

June 27, 1973
Prior to that fateful evening a few weeks after high school graduation, I’d been a regular red-blooded teenage American male. I would label my prior worldview as Humanist — a belief that you and I, as elite members of the food chain, are the ultimate lifeform, and as such, are entitled to happiness and autonomy. On that particular night, I engaged in a lengthy conversation with a fellow far more experienced than me in his understanding of life.

Whether you want to label it as frontal lobe development, cultural brainwashing, or supernatural intervention, by the time I left that conversation, I experienced a total renovation of my worldview. I had come to understand that the concept of “chance plus time” was just not a workable explanation for the complexity of the world and, especially, the complexity of human beings.

I fully embraced the concept of creation — that somewhere in the far distant past, a magnificently brilliant author had set all this in motion. More important, I understood that the very Creator of all we see and know, had a personal interest in the individual characters in His story — regardless of how numerous and rebellious those characters might be.

Like the overwhelming majority of folks who come to that viewpoint, I set out to please God. I purposed to stop being and asshole and become an angel…and it worked…intermittently. My life became like a sinewave, embracing that “good” me for a while and routinely slip-sliding back to the “old me”, only to be self-guilted into painting over the bad and gluing my angel wings back in place for another futile attempt at righteousness.

In order to keep from going insane, I engaged in two practices that I still see people participating in every day — I constantly noted how other people were even worse than me (“At least I’m not like that asshole.”) and, second, I began to shave the edges off my definition of “Morality” by rationalizing that what I had previously recognized as the character of the Creator, was really just dominant cultural norms which would fade away with progress and could be ignored without consequence. Oops.

Reconning Day(s)
I cannot tie this second milestone to any specific date but I can say that over the last two dozen years, my need for comparative self-justification has eroded immensely. In fact, I’ve come to accept that within any gathering I’ve ever attended, the biggest asshole in the room has always been me. *Note: If you seize this opportunity to email me with your hearty agreement on this point, you may just invalidate my whole thesis.

But understanding how deep my self-serving nature runs is only half of the equation. If there really is a Creator, and that Creator accepts me as I am, in all my “assholeness”, then how on Earth can I condemn a semi-asshole like you, which that Creator also accepts unconditionally?

Perhaps the answer is to quit trying to paint ourselves like angels and accept ourselves as broken creatures, basking in the indescribable grace and love of a personal creator who also just happens to love that asshole next door. Who knows? That could substantially change our view of other people and maybe even begin to effect change in our own souls.

Think I’m senile? I’m certainly open to hear your better explanation. Just don’t try to convince me it’s objective.

A meeting of great minds who think alike