Going to Extremes
Some years ago I was sitting listening to a conversation between a group of female friends who were all aged around thirty. They were having the traditional ‘what I would do if Gareth cheated on me’ conversation. The answer, in case you were wondering, was all manner of punishments from actual physical harm to the man to throwing his clothes out into the street and scratching his car.
Entertaining as this was to listen to, I had to tell them that they were all wrong. Being cheated on is such a huge and traumatic event in someone’s life that knowing how you will react is impossible until you are there. I am not saying that you cannot know about it, we all have the capacity to learn from others and heaven knows I can explain to you the pros and cons of having an epidural without any actual, direct experience but there are some events which are so huge that you simply do not know whether you will react by performing surgery on Gareth’s testicles or by sitting in a corner and crying for three months. I am a fun man to have in relationship conversations, eh?
The reason I mention this is that we seem to be living in an age in which only the extremes are permissible. You have to be 100% into something or 0% into something. The days of having a slight interest or being a little upset about things seem to have gone. None of those women were discussing Gareth not sending long enough texts, how he didn’t wish them a proper happy St Dwynwen’s Day or his overall failure to embrace the joy of love (or the washing up). We are drawn to the extremes and that is largely impractical. I am going to stick my neck out here and say that the likelihood of Gareth cheating is lower than the likelihood of Gareth not taking his turn doing the dishes.
Pacifists will be well aware of this. I promise you that if you are a pacifist then you have heard the question, “What would you have done in 1939?” I have written on this page before about how pacifism is about the removal of all violence and causes of violence from your life, but people do always view it as being about 1939. Not that that is not a valid question. When faced with an existential threat to the place you live from a regime that no-one sensible could defend, what would you do? The reason that organisations such as the Friends Ambulance Brigade existed so that people could support the war effort without fighting is because people wrestled with this question. However, even if you took the twentieth century as a whole, how many people were actually faced with that choice?
This resort to the extreme examples becomes widespread though. I once chaired a discussion on pacifism and someone told me that they could not attend because they believed that military intervention was sometimes justified. That was frustrating because his views would have been very useful to have and the idea that more violence can sometimes solve violence is one that needs to be discussed. Similarly, I recently met a man who said that he could not be a pacifist because ‘if someone attacked my family, I would have to defend them’. Of course you would and I would put a bet on most pacifists agreeing. However, look where we are, with the extreme examples.
If you want to ask a question about pacifism, ask about what you would do if a van cut you up on the motorway. Ask what would happen if a friend is rude to you because they think that you offended one of their friends. Think what you would do if someone accused you of something that you know is probably true. The dilemmas of pacifism are every day, they are not only about bombing Libya to stop the violence there (that one worked well, eh?). Just for the record, twice I have defended someone without attacking their aggressor.
The extreme example has become part of the ‘posturing’ style of argument. It is not really an argument, it is a pose to demonstrate assumed superiority. I will give you an example – a few years ago I was at a works event in Las Iguanas and when I ordered a burger (this was before I was a vegetarian), the man opposite me angrily demanded, “Would you eat your grandmother?”
I missed the obvious reply, which should have been, “Are you calling my grandmother a cow?” but his question was nonsense. I do not equate the life of a cow with the life of my grandmother, so that question meant nothing to me. However, he assumed that because that was what he believed, then everyone should believe that. The number of times that I will be called on to eat my grandmother are exactly the same number of times that I will be alive in 1939, but here we are at the extremes. When I did become a vegetarian, it was absolutely nothing to do with a random man in a bar shouting at me. Then again, as I say, people who talk like that are not arguing with you, they are posturing. It is never about what you believe, it is only ever about what they believe.
The topic of food politics is riddled with these arguments. For balance, I count the comment I heard at Christmas about “what would happen if everyone turned vegan” in the same way. That is not going to happen or rather, if it does happen then it will happen slowly (personally, I think that meat-eating will survive as a luxury for the rich, along with driving petrol cars but that is a different blog). The problem is with this is that obscures much more worthwhile conversation. A BBC consumer programme recently ran an article asking ‘is vegan food healthy?’ the answer to which is, of course, that with any kind of food it depends how it is made and what is in it. The point should be that you should know what is in your food and how it came to be there. That is too subtle for the age of extremes.
Is this all new? I am not sure that it is. People like to compare the 2010s to the 1930s, but I think that politics has always been infused with this extremism and that politicians ought to be better at calling it out. I was recently watching Rich Hall’s documentary about the Presidential system in the USA and i was reminded that Michael Dukakis had fared badly in the 1988 Presidential election because of his poor answer to the debate question – “What would you do if your wife was raped and murdered by a convicted criminal?” I am not sure that he would have been elected had he told the journalist that that was a nonsense question, but it would have been sensible.
I shall leave you with one more non-political example because if we want to avoid living in the Age of Extremes, then we all need to take a step back from living at the extremes. It is another food politics one. In 2019, a student activist from Swansea went to the city centre and started to write in chalk on the paved area outside McDonalds. He wrote things that were deliberately uncontroversial, from the bland ‘go vegan’ to the wonderfully nuanced ‘some studies have shown a link between processed foods and some kinds of cancer’. There was nothing that he wrote that was untrue or offensive. What do you think that the diners in McDonalds did? Did they ignore him? Did they engage him in a sensible argument? Did they go away and do research into the issues involved? Oh come now, we live in the age of extremes, they called the police.
The police never seem to be much interested in protestors having any rights and so they informed the young man that he was ‘causing a public nuisance’ and would be arrested if he did not stop. Having already written quite a few slogans and, by now, gained the attention of the local press and social media (who might not have been so interested without the help of the police in publicising the story), he went back home. However, you have to reflect on the immense waste of everyone’s time and resources because people in McDonalds are upset about chalk that they disagree with.
No, stormed someone on social media, you should remember that this will take time and taxpayers’ money to clean up. There was a perfect response – “The rain will wash it away. It is Swansea. It will rain soon.”
I am not sure that the age of extremes is new, but I do know that we could live much more sensible, stress-free and thoughtful lives if we spent less time speculating about destroying Gareth’s possessions and more time trying to get him to do the washing up.