before i will like you or listen to what you have to say, or take you seriously, you have to gain my respect (especially if you are an authority figure, but we won’t worry about that). if i don’t respect you, i won’t desire to get to know you on a deep level. there’s even the chance that i’ll do my best to challenge you at every turn. if i don’t respect you, it would not be fun for us to work together. just because i don’t respect you, of course, doesn’t mean that everything is over. i can still tolerate you. i can put you at arm’s distance and, at every time you make a mistake (these times are often), even make excuses for you (did i expect you to meet my standards?). i can smile and be civil, but if you corner me at a large group meeting and start talking to me, it will be obvious that i want nothing more than to leave.
by default, of course, i respect no one. these are the ways in which i can come to actually respect you:
1. you can be as good as or better than me at philosophy (this is major respect)
2. you can evidence substantial merit in some academic field (except Urban Studies or shit like that)
3. you can be suitably athletic
4. you can be humble to the point that in our interactions my own arrogance is made obvious even to me
5. you can have some really amazing skill or talent (music, art) such that i know i couldn’t do what you do
6. you can be outgoing and always the center of attention (i.e., popular)
7. you can prove me wrong
8. you can be from another country
9. you can speak fluently languages other than english
10. you can do something that just amazes me, like, buy 6 acres of land in costa rica as an investment
and, for girls:
11. you can be really good-looking (although, this one can’t stand alone. so it only works by itself until you open your mouth)
and, when i do come to respect you, i will do anything to make you my friend. if on any given day i think you have some reservations about me, don’t like me, are disappointed with me, or some such situation holds, that day will feel like the worst in my life. i will feel like a failure. i will basically try to make you as integral a part of my life as humanly possible, because your value is automatically internalized, and i want it.
now, i’ll spare you the list of things which make me go from having a neutral attitude towards you to one of disrespect. because that’s not the point. what is the point? the point is that respect, as defined by the list i gave, is what denotes my relational attitude to you. and, defined that way, it is clearly wrong. it is wrong to not desire to interact with people just because they don’t fulfill some criteria. but this is, i think, exactly how i operate.
so, the solution is either to give up respect as the thing which motivates me to seek relationships with people, or to re-define respect so as to make it acceptable (say, by adding “you can be a human”). here are the problems with those approaches: for the former, it seems impossible to change what naturally motivates me to like people and want them to like me. or, maybe i should just not have any criteria–i should like people indiscriminately. either way, i’m not foreseeing anything that is within my power to change. and, as to the latter option, it obviously won’t work, because the list is unfortunately ad hoc: i don’t come upon person X and decide if i respect X by checking X’s properties against the list. no–i respect whom i will (i have no idea why)–i just built up the list from examples of people whom i respect. bottom line is it doesn’t seem possible to create an a priori set of things i respect. so modifying such an a priori set is even less possible.
i’ve been speaking of relationships generally, but all of this holds just as well for romantic relationships. of course, romantic relationships have their own special difficulties. here’s an example:
if we assume that eventually i figure out how to like people and seek deep relationships with them equally, and not based on some “jonathan’s ad hoc system of merit”, this raises a problem for romantic relationships. because, if i apply my new understanding about relationships in general to them, i might as well date anybody. girl X will work same as girl Y. but you are saying “well, that’s one of the reasons we know romantic love isn’t like community/relational love in the first place. so you have nothing”. ok, granted. but we can think of the problem in a different light: when i choose to date someone, i either have criteria or i don’t. and, if i do have criteria (i.e., before i date you i make sure you fit the bill, whatever that is), it seems that i am being unspiritually chauvinistic (in the technical sense of the term). but if i don’t, it is hard to see why i haven’t been married for the past 4 years.
the answer? i dunno. maybe it is to have some criteria, and make sure that those are the right criteria. still, i think the ones that we can say with certainty are right (like, “is human”) leave too many options open: it’s too liberal to explain what all the fuss is about finding “the One” (or even “the One I Happened To Meet of Several Possibilities”).
it is at this point that the christian idea that god will make my mate obvious (even if there are multiple possibilities to him) becomes very attractive. because then it is no longer about who fulfills my sorry criteria, or about which desiderata she doesn’t meet. it is about who i am meant to love. of course, we have to assume also that god picks someone, as the person i am meant to love, whom i actually will love. but since god is probably a better judge of character and personality than i am, i trust we can let him make that decision. there–problem solved? sure.
see, attractive! but also not, because it means all my philosophizing is more or less useless. it means that writing long blog entries like this because of thoughts about life, love, and why are ultimately exercises with no purpose. spinning wheels. treading water. dry heaves. shooting blanks. or, maybe that’s not a bad thing–maybe these have their uses. treading water may not get me anywhere, but the more i do it, the more prepared my muscles will be for the time when i’m actually ready to go somewhere! (now that i think about it, none of the other actions in the list have any particularly beneficial purpose, ahem).
and with that, we end: more useless logic-chopping to come, just you wait!
