San Francisco’s Frameline Film Festival: On the Negative Impact of the Castro’s Culture

Ideological intolerance may not be typically thought of as stemming from a psychological pathology from unresolved emotional problems, especially if the ideology is classified under “political speech.” Even so, the vehemence with which flashes of hostility are unleashed by an intolerant ideologue against people objecting to the person’s ideology and thus to it being imposed as if it were God’s eternal truth is plainly psychological. Volunteering at a film festival in San Francisco in late June, 2026, I was the receiver, or lightening rod, of such vitriol from two attendees and the festival’s manager who oversaw the volunteers because I had unwittingly made statements that violated the dominant ideology not only at the festival, but in San Francisco moreover. In business schools, it is well known (or should be well known) that an organizational culture can reflect a wider culture in the organization’s environment. A toxic local or societal norm, which reflects values, beliefs, and even assumptions held by a sufficient proportion of inhabitants to gain a “critical mass,” can infect organizational cultures within the locality or society. I contend that this dynamic applied to the Frameline (LGBT) film festival in 2026 and the wider the Castro (gay) district of San Francisco then, where the festival was based. The same overreaching ideology and hostile defense mechanism were salient both in the non-profit organization and, extending beyond the Castro neighborhood, in San Francisco itself as well as in at least some of the suburbs.

On my first shift as a volunteer, and I agreed to volunteer at all so I could include some examples of “gay cinema” in a forthcoming book I was writing on film as an excellent medium for stimulating philosophical and theological thinking, I casually mentioned to two young women who had just seen the film that was shown during my first shift that I was impressed that the film has two lesbian sex scenes. Even though my tone was that of a compliment, one of the young (presumably lesbian) women angrily declared to me, “That’s heterosexual sex!”  as if her fact trumped what was merely an opinion on my part. “No,” I slowly retorted, “a sex scene with two vaginas is not heterosexual.” To my shock, the two women dismissed this fact by stating, as if declaring a fact of their own making, “No, it doesn’t work that way.” Translation: two vaginas without any penis in a sex act is heterosexual if one of the women self-identifies mentally as a man, which was the case in the film. The context of my remark was that I came slowly to the realization during the film that the sex scenes involved two vaginas rather than a vagina and a penis. My position was that a person’s mental state does not impact the label on whether a sex scene is homosexual or heterosexual; a (real) penis and a vagina, and, technically, penetration of the former into the latter, are requisite to a sex scene being classified as heterosexual rather than homosexual. That ideological fervor can overreach so much, even to contradict such well-established labels as homosexual and heterosexual (and violate even common sense!), means that a vulnerability exists in the human brain, and therefore human nature itself, with respect to ideology in relation to facts. In other words, the fact/value distinction is vulnerable to values overruling facts.

I was stunned during the ensuing week when I discussed the conversation with other people. A handful, all under 35 years old, pushed back against my rather obvious claim that a sex scene centered on and involving two vaginas (and no penises) is not heterosexual. One college student said, “It could be.” Plain and simply, she was incorrect. Tellingly, people over 40, on the other hand, were as stunned as I was regarding the pushback I had been encountering. “That’s just crazy,” an 88 year-old gay man said in referring to the assertion that a sexual act between two vaginas (and no penis) is heterosexual. The human mind seems to be too weak, at least in the case of ideologues, to put the brakes on an ideology when it has gone too far in a person’s mind. Psychology is in the mix. One young man who actually had been awarded a Ph.D. in natural science repeatedly shouted at me at a coffee shop as if he were regressing back to his childhood, “You’re an idiot! You’re an idiot!” He could barely control himself emotionally. The arrogance that is in ideological idolatry can be so powerful in the mind that it malfunctions without even realizing it. The impact of ideology on a mind’s self-regulatory features deserves much greater attention both in scholarship and the public square. 

In addition to mental states, ideological fervor and even intense flashes of anger do not trump cognitive definitions. The sheer presumption in contradicting definitions, even more than the flashes of anger unleased on me, is what really shocked me because I had never encountered such overreaching of an ideology. Such presumption is like arrogance on stilts during a flood, and yet strangely such an ideologue’s mind is unaware of the overreach and its presumption. Besides the blatant distortion of the word “heterosexual” beyond recognition such that it could be applied as a label to homosexual sex acts in a film, the vengeance of the two young lesbians complaining about my “inappropriate” statement—the very word, inappropriate, signals subjectivity—added insult to the initial injury of being so blatantly disrespected. But for their ideological fervor having reached the level of idolatry, the two young women could have left the theater without feeling an instinctual urge to harm me. Pleasure from inflicting pain on another person is garden variety sadism, and, according to Nietzsche, the original function of punishment before moral responsibility came to be associated.

Cicily Singh, who managed the Frameline (LGBT) festival’s volunteer corps that year, instinctually reacted to the women’s complaint of my “inappropriate” statements ideologically, meaning with much prejudice because she held the very same ideology as the two women at the theater. For Cicily wrote a hostile, accusatory email to me without even having contacted me first to ask what I had actually said to the two vindictive young women. “The film contains a lesbian sex scene,” and then my explaining, “because there are two vaginas,” is in no sense inappropriate, especially at a gay film festival! Ironically, it was Cicily’s email that was inappropriate. She must have been very ideologically and, relatedly, emotionally incensed, for she was sufficiently impulsive to send me the harsh, accusatory email, which contained an implicit threat that my continued involvement at the festival was then on thin ice, in time for me to read her message while I was en route to my last shift, rather than only once it had been completed. Ideological idolatry and the related emotional state can confound rationality, and thus thinking strategically. I unilaterally activated the implied threat and implemented it myself—"that’s called taking the initiative.”[1] I quickly wrote a brief rebuttal and turned back (to do my own work!) rather than continue on to the theater to freely give my labor to such a resentful, too ideologically-driven group of people as were evidently running the film festival. Afterall, this point must be made perfectly clear: saying that a sex scene is not heterosexual because it is centered on and delimited by two vaginas is not inappropriate; in fact, it is an accurate statement, and entirely fitting at an LGBT (gay) film festival.

It is important to situate both the two young lesbians and Cicily in the local gay culture of San Francisco, which I at the time may have been very distinct from the gay cultures in other cities in several respects—all in excess. To be sure, I have no empirical studies to cite to support my conjecture. From my own observations of the distinctive sub-culture, my impression is that gay men under 50 or 60 years of age in the Castro district were both more ideologically fixated and angrier at people who opposed their sociopolitical-linguistic ideology than were gay men typically in other large cities in North America and Europe. San Francisco “Pride” had arguably gone too far in its ideological intolerance and aggressive vindictiveness not in pushing back against heterosexual anti-gay prejudice but, rather, against non-acceptance of the “woke” ideology and agenda, and in particular the linguistic dogmatism. Home-grown ideology, rather than opposition by evangelical Christians to homosexuality, had become a problem in the Castro (gay) district by 2026 as evinced by the presumed entitlement to overreach and to lash out in anger so to verbally attack anyone who is an obstacle to the overly expansive sense of self and the presumption to declare facts out of what is actually ideological opinion. The advocates and defenders of the “woke” ideology had taken the place of the evangelical “Christian right” of the 1980s in claiming truth for themselves out of what was in actuality opinion. The ideological intolerance had shifted from the hard right to the progressive left since the twentieth century. That virtually none of the gay inhabitants of the Castro were probably conscious of having taken their own ideology too far both in its content and its vehement defense can be taken as an indictment on the human brain itself, and, more particularly, on its ability to perceive going too far.

After having quit the festival after the second of my three shifts, I voted with my feet on the day after the festival’s closing night by not going to downtown San Francisco to watch the gays in their parade; I had heard and witnessed too much hostility and self-righteousness in that sub-culture for its advocates to deserve being watched performing “on stage.” I will not furnish several examples of the toxicity manifested as hostility and even aggressiveness within the subculture—the dysfunctional psychology mirrors and likely even augmented or intensified the anger and vindictiveness that I encountered at the Frameline film festival. By analogy, the more general heating of the temperature at the Castro arguably contributed to the “heatwave” that I encountered at the film festival. During that very week, in fact, scientists were making precisely this argument in regard to the heatwave then occurring in Europe—the temporary El Nino was not the driving force behind the record heat.

Several contributory factors can be identified to account for the impact of the toxic Castro culture (i.e., global warming) on the film festival’s organizational dysfunction (i.e., the heatwave). Firstly, the harsh rudeness and abject inconsiderateness, and even cruelty, with which gay men in the Castro commonly would intentionally not show up for previously-arranged (sex) date without even bothering to cancel because suddenly another man is available for sex. A guy not showing up, without bothering to cancel, at a meeting place (e.g., my place or yours) previously agreed with another guy was called “flaking,” and the disrespect in particular and the passive aggression more generally were severe enough psychologically to cause strong anger. Similarly, the language that Castro men typically used in rejecting unwanted overtures by other men for sex, such as “you’re fat” and “you’re old; you don’t belong in this bar,” doubtlessly caused outrage. Rather than being emotionally hurt from prejudice locally against homosexuality, too many gay men in the Castro were slicing into other gay men there too often and too deeply. It is as if enjoying being cruel had become engrained within gay culture. It may be that the ideological anger that was directed to me at the festival was fueled at least in part by the legitimate anger and even rage caused by gay men there. It is not as if such intense anger simply dissipates on its own; rather, it seeks openings.

Secondly, I learned from two long-time residents—two friends of mine—that the gay employees in the Castro who worked as bartenders and servers (waiters) had a reputation by 2026 for being rude, and even hostile, to customers—ruder than in other areas of the city. In the Castro, tips at fast-food (i.e., counter) food-places, bars, and even coffee shops were, according to several gay men and at least one resentful employee at the coffee shop, Poesia, required rather than up to the discretion of the patrons. “It’s the Castro standard,” a young gay man sitting with a friend at a table near mine outside at Poesia’s street-level café said in scolding me for having just objected to the petulant, hostile employee who had angrily chastised me for not tipping on coffee orders, which, by the way, the customers picked up at the counter and returned after use to a plastic bin. The self-righteous, immature gay man sitting near me then dismissively walked away from me with his friend while making it clear to me that he was laughing at me for having insisted that tips are not required anywhere, even in the Castro. In other words, the “standard” was wrong, and employees of the various establishments were wholly without justification in tacitly punishing regular customers who do not tip on every occasion. That tips were by then solicited prior to any service in many food establishments everywhere is nonsensical enough; that the self-interested employees at the cash registers in the Castro retail district blatantly looked at the screen to see if customers were selecting tips is unseemly. That an employee would then lash out at a customer for not designating a tip prior to service and thus before the quality of service can possibly be assessed, as if tipping were required, is beyond the pale and thus points to a dysfunctional business climate.

It is possible that at least some of the employees’ hostility toward non-tipping customers was due to pent up anger from having been rudely and even cruelly treated by other gay men in the context of “hooking up” for sex, and from other sordid behaviors discussed below. My larger point is that the vindictiveness of the two young women in the theater and the accusatory hostility of Cicily can be seen as not so isolated as they may prime facie appear.  

Thirdly, the hostility of non-supervisory employees at retail establishments in the Castro went beyond resentment due to a presumed entitlement to be tipped by every customer regardless of service. For example, a young Black gay man working at one bar, “440,” presumed himself entitled to demand of certain (Caucasian) tourists what their purposes were in visiting the city. Another employee was reported to have told one such tourist who complained about the first employee’s invasiveness, “We do screen certain customers.” Of course, well-to-do tourists usually appear very suspicious, and may even need to be strip-searched.  This story gets even better. At least one tourist that know of told the employee at the front door, “It’s none of your business why I am in San Francisco.” Not to be outdone by a mere prospective customer, the employee abused his discretion by blocking that tourist’s access to the bar for having been rude. The tourist subsequently reported that the other employee and several young gay customers drinking beer just outside the bar chastised the tourist for being so stupid as to be rude to an employee of the bar. Because the tourist had not been at all rude, the multi-pronged attack was excessive, and thus can be taken as yet another “data point” indicative of the excessive anger and hostility in the Castro district. I suspect that the same ideology that I came up against at the film festival was in play in the attack on the tourist. Furthermore, the anger and vindictiveness that I encountered may have been excessive in part because the “temperature” in the Castro was excessive.

The position of the city’s Board of Supervisors—San Francisco’s City Council— was that screening tourists is not the job of local businesses, and the statement, “It’s none of your business,” is not rude, especially when it really is none of the employee’s business!  The outrageous presumptuousness in the Castro’s culture can be calibrated by the reality-check by the city’s own government. Of course, the likely negative impact on the city’s revenue from the wholly unjustified screening of certain tourists at a local business during a year when tourism was down was not lost on city hall. Even so, the egregiousness displayed in front of the “440” bar is not unlike that which insists that a sex scene involving two vaginas is heterosexual rather than homosexual.  

Fourthly, evincing even more hostility that the employees and even customers at “440” bar, a Black gay young man who worked as a bouncer at another bar, “The Mix,” put at risk the elderly Caucasian victim of a violent attack that had just been committed by two Black gay young men as they were walking out of the same bathroom stall (likely sniffing cocaine). Those two young men did not feel the need to walk around the victim, who was waiting in line at the bathroom, in spite of there being enough space. Instead, they decided to walk through the old man, who, after having been thrown and slammed into a nearby wall, notified the bouncer and another employee of having just been attacked, and called the emergency number of the local police, who of course wanted the address of the bar, but the employee in front of the bar checking ID’s refused to disclose the address to the victim and the police on his phone, so the victim walked outside in front of the bar and continued the call there. The two attackers, tipped off by an employee, I suspect, that the victim was on the phone with the police, went outside to verbally threaten the victim for having called the police. Astonishingly, the Black bouncer was within earshot of the threats and yet he body-blocked the door so the victim could not seek safety inside the bar, in spite having been attacked. In fact, the bouncer let the two attackers back inside the bar! That bar’s organizational culture was clearly very toxic, and the two young gay men who had been in the same stall in the bathroom clearly had excess anger. Any prejudice against gays (or Black people) by outsiders cannot be blamed; the excessive aggression was within the gay “community.”

Fifthly, perhaps the most toxic aspect of the gay culture in the Castro, and thus the source of the most intense anger, which could easily feed into hostility towards people who do not subscribe to the dominant ideology, concerns the severity of dysfunction in how too many gay men there thought of and handled their romantic relationships—not just “hooking up” for sex. It may be that Castro “standards” were too dogmatic in being presented as requirements. We encountered this above concerning tips, which were most definitely not required. A much more toxic “requirement” commonly accepted by gay men under 40 in the Castro was having to accept the imposing by a gay man on his boyfriend and even husband of a right to have separate sex (i.e., excluding the boyfriend or husband) with other men even with romantic attachment because, as this was explained to me rather dogmatically, “everyone here does it.” The obvious emotional discomfort felt, while the separate sex would be going on, by a boyfriend or husband who is in love with the person engaged in the sex with someone else may even be dismissed by the selfish and callous person in the convenient ideological belief that he has the right to impose separate romantic sex because everyone else in the Castro was doing it. Besides taking an obvious toll on the emotional intimacy and trust in the relationship in which coupling would otherwise naturally take place, both the decision to impose exogenous “making love,” as if such behavior were justified simply because many gay men were doing it and subscribed to the underlying “poly” ideology, and the callous disregard for the boyfriend’s or husband’s obvious emotional pain doubtlessly caused deep emotional hurt and anger in the boyfriend or husband that would not easily dissipate, but would instead seek out openings to erupt in misdirected and thus excessive anger, such as I encountered at the film festival. In fact, I encountered cases in which the ideology “justifying” the imposition of a polyamorous (i.e., more than one romantic love) relationship caused young men whose partners victimized them by the imposition to deny any such discomfort or hurt feelings, let along anger. One man in the Castro said to me, “I don’t mind that my boyfriend is having a separate romantic sexual relationship.” Interestingly, when I asked a few much older married gay men how they would feel were their respective husbands to announce upcoming romantic sex with an old flame, those men admitted, albeit hesitatively because they knew the polyamorous ideology was dominate then in the Castro, that they would have a problem if their respective husbands said that an old flame would be coming to town the next week and sex would occur. “Yeah, I’d have a problem with that,” a man who had been with his partner for thirty years in an open relationship. Honesty with the courage to go up against a dogmatic ideology is a virtue. In contrast, feeling obliged to “stuff,” or repress, and even deny the very existence of deep emotional discomfort and anger because discomfort is disallowed by the ideology that insists that there is nothing wrong with separate romantic sex, so any discomfort in the partner left out would be unjustified, and thus inappropriate, and perhaps even unfair to the partner having the separate romantic sex! Everyone does it in the Castro, so why should I have to put up with his discomfort and even anger? The level of psychological toxicity in such “reasoning” is astounding. Pent-up emotional pain and hostility would be entirely natural, whereas the imposition would be selfish ideological hubris that cares little if anything about the feelings of other people.

That ideology comes with at least two internal flaws. Firstly, it backs up its approval of the imposing of a “right” to have separate romantic sex by championing the polyamorous, “multiple loves,” relationship. But as a bisexual woman pointed out to me in the Castro (as I was trying unsuccessfully to ask her out), “In a polyamorous relationship in which more than two persons are in the same romantic relationship, every party must freely consent; to affirm that outside romantic sex should be accepted, and thus is legitimately imposed, is just an excuse to cheat.” There was undoubtedly a lot of cheating on boyfriends and husbands in the Castro, as if gay men have such overwhelming sexual urges that polyamorous sex and even affairs outside of even such a multi-person relationship should be tolerated even by boyfriends and husbands. Enough heterosexual men with strong sex drives have nonetheless managed to be faithful sexually inside of marriage that manly lust cannot excuse gay men who cheat on their boyfriends or husbands.

Secondly, the ideology behind the imposing makes use of the proposition that a widely followed societal custom (i.e., “Everybody here does it”) is ethical (“Everyone here should do it”) because it is widely accepted. This is an invalid argument. David Hume’s naturalistic fallacy is precisely the error of inferring from even a common practice that it justifies ethically rather than is merely descriptive. To treat a descriptive norm that is as a should just because the norm exists is an erroneous move in ethics. Ethical justification, such as by an ethical principle or theory, is necessary to get from is to ought.

In the Castro, the naturalistic fallacy likely stems from self-righteous egoism that treats self-interest as normative. Just because so many young and middle-age gay men in the Castro who were in romantic relationships also had separate romantic sex outside of the relationships does not mean that because the separate romantic sex is ethically justified because such sex is in someone’s self-interest. For someone to inform a prospective boyfriend, “I will have sex with my friends (including old and current flames), and if you object, I’ll just have sex with strangers and risk your health.” A prospective boyfriend should run, not walk, from such abject coldness befitting a psychopath. Such disregard for the feelings of a prospective boyfriend may even include the motivation for pleasure from the infliction of emotional pain. Furthermore, a fear of commitment, which can stem from underlying severe emotional problems that have not been processed and resolved, may draw on the power that a person has in a relationship to enforce the demand that separate romantic sex be accepted. The use of separate sex as a weapon to emotionally distant a boyfriend or husband points to severe emotional problems even if the neurosis is ubiquitous in a city’s sub-culture and thus misconstrued by its residents as normal rather than pathological.

Aside from relationships, a particularly squalid sexual “tactic” practiced on the Castro and regarded as “normal” and thus as acceptable involves casual sexual “meet ups.” According to two sources, a gay man using another man who is only mediocre physically attractive to the man for foreplay—for sexual arousal only—to be followed by lying that something has come up and “to be continued later,” but then once the man has left, inviting a more attractive man over for the actual sex. This squalid practice goes on even in the city’s gay Marshall Beach, near the Golden Gate Bridge, where oral and anal sex occur on the sand, out in the open. A less attractive guy may be used only for arousal, then once that has taken place, the guy is discarded and a more attractive man is immediately sought out and secured for anal sex, even as the “warm-up” guy is still there and sees that he has been unceremoniously replaced. Beyond the intense self-centeredness, the sheer callousness is obvious in such a set-up.

The prolonging of adolescence, given the adamant refusal to deal with past emotional distresses and the widespread occurrence of drug or alcohol addiction, has arguably played a role in keeping the Castro’s sub-culture dysfunctional. Even “cheating” has also been conveniently and erroneously imposed as being “normal.” Such sordid norms had arguably come to enjoy default-status by the mid 2020’s, and it is precisely in being given the status of the status-quo that even highly dysfunctional mentalities and practices can be deemed imposable. Such flagrantly callous arrogance on stilts, as if during a biblical flood, suggests that a clean sweep was desperately needed in the Castro to clear away the hubris. Bad air!

In conclusion, the narrow ideological judgmentalism and the ensuing hostility toward (mis)perceived threats at the Frameline film festival in 2026 was in sync with the toxic sub-culture in the Castro district and aggravated by there being so much accumulated anger and hurt feelings there. Lashing out at people who do not subscribe to a dominant ideology that is rigorously enforced by passive aggression can be an easy opening for pent-up anger from other things to finally erupt, especially if an ideology shames that anger from being directed at its source. In terms of further study, investigating how the Castro’s heavily ideological culture and excessive built-up baseline of anger and hostility impacted the selection of films to be included in the festival in 2026 might reveal not only how narrow the festival’s ideological coverage actually was, but also just how reflective Framework was that year of the local sub-culture. How many films were selected that are critical of young “trophy whores,” for example, whose respective older “holders” live with their respective real romantic partners even in another country and yet the promiscuous young men who are selfishly being held at a distance presume to impose separate romantic sex, even with the “primary and secondary” in the other country on a prospective real boyfriend?  Would a gay film director even make such a film? What about a film that shows “warm up” guys being lied to so sex with a better-looking man can ensue? In other words, what would a truly diverse gay film festival that is honest look like? Would the problem of gay men ruthlessly turning on each other be covered? If indeed homosexual love can be just as healthy, self-confident and trusting, and thus emotionally intimate, as the romantic love between a man and a woman can be, then the squalid elements of the Castro culture have no excuse for being permitted by the gay men themselves. I do not believe that ideological aggression is inherent in gay culture and psychology, but is instead an aberration that can be treated even when it becomes ubiquitous in a gay district of a city such as San Francisco. Ideological idolatry should not be allowed to mask undergirding psychological pathology. As I wrote to Cicily Singh regarding the two young women (paraphrasing here): “Clinical psychology is not one of my academic fields, so I am not equipped to triage a young person who is emotionally troubled and thus triggered by a perfectly acceptable and thus appropriate statement. Best of luck.” That was my way of quitting while at the same time criticizing the passive aggression by passive aggressively “socially distancing” myself from an ideologically driven presumptiveness and hostility by reducing it to psychology.

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1. Quote taken from the film, Avatar (2009), masterfully delivered by Stephen Lang as Colonel Miles Quaritch. “Reprising” his role in the sequel was so outlandish in terms of the rationale for the reprisal that the sequel itself could be said to be less than credible in terms of its narrative. In other words, the rationale put that film under water. 

Love as God Loves Us: Embodying Inconvenient Compassion

I contend that compassion is an automatic byproduct of having shut out the outside world for a time to experience transcendence in its religious sense (i.e., reaching beyond the limits of human conception, perception, and emotion). Such experience as prayer, for example, or meditation can result in a heightened sensitivity in perceiving the world, including things and other people who are in proximity. Such sensitivity where other people are being perceived can illicit compassion to them. It is the bracketing experience itself, away from our daily life, rather than what is being prayed about or meditated on that triggers the generalized sensitivity and thus the enhanced readiness or inclination to feel compassion where it applies. I submit furthermore that with some beliefs regarding how God in the Abrahamic religions views us creatures in Creation, we mere mortals can assume to some degree the perspective that, given how God is depicted in scriptures, God would or does have in watching us in our own little worlds.

Roughly speaking, God may look down at us from heaven similar to how a parent perceives one’s child, but here as a small creature doing the best that a small yet selfish created being can.  Augustine warns that applying the relation between a human father and son should not be thought to apply to the relation between the Father and the Son in the Christian Trinity. Specifically, Augustine wrote that human weakness “can only think of what it has been accustomed to do or hear.”[1] Augustine urges that “no carnal thought creep up” in thinking of Jesus’ phrase, “As the Father has taught me,” like how a human father teaches his son.[2] Thinking of the relationship in the Trinity as being akin to a human relationship would be to “fashion idols.”[3] Human weakness might prompt us to reduce God’s perception of us to seeing our weaknesses, but God’s perspective on Creation, including the created beings within it, would more likely be to see us as functioning as well as we can in our little corners of this created realm. Not even a parent looks at one’s very young child, or toddler, as being weak in trying to walk for the first time, or even the second or third time. Rather, from this analogy, I submit that God sees even human adults as small, circumscibed  beings fiddling with ourselves without situating ourselves in the wider context of Creation, and beyond. Such a divine perspective is subtle and wholistic and yet penetrating and specific. The good news is that we can assume that perspective to an extent sufficient to change our negative attitudes and emotions regarding another person, whether we deem that person to be ugly, pathetic, strange, or crazy, to genuine compassion as though a friendly demeanor were a natural end in itself.

One morning while on a local transit system’s bus, I watched with a visceral feeling of distaste as a particularly ugly woman aged about 60 years boarded, sat down, and proceeded to keep her miuth open while touching her tongue with one and then another of her fingers longer than to lick off something edible. The sight of the person was itself revolting to me and yet I couldn’t help myself in staring in disgust (though not showing my reaction). Writing in retrospect, I feel ashamed of myself. It was not that she gave the impression of being a bad person, and not yet of being mentally ill. At the time, I thought about how God manifested as the Father in Christianity might look on human beings specifically as finite, imperfect creatures (meaning in Creation), doing the best that we can. Looking at a living person from outside the created realm would change how we observe other people. This shift in perspective is difficult to describe.

In allowing myself to assume such a stance, though without presuming myself to be divine and thus superior to the woman, my attitude toward her instantly changed to one in which I saw her not as weak or pathetic. Instead, I saw her creatureliness as she tended to herself as best she could.

We all can be pitied in spite of our nasty selfish pettyiness because from God’s perspective, we look like little children rather than self-sufficient adults. Our existence is radically of fundamentally contingent rather than solid and complete. By intentionally assuming that perspective to some degree, and thus without presuming ourselves  to be like God in that respect, my anger and disgust suddenly dissipated. I did not yet feel compassion for her, but I did notice that my attitude toward the woman was then much different that that of a well-dressed Caucasian man who was eyeing the poor Black man who had just dropped his bag and was standing in the aisle close in front of the other man, who was seated. I could understand and even identify with the distaste that comes when someone enters my personal space too closely, but I was more taken with how much my attitude toward the ugly woman had changed from that of the seated man looking up at the Black man who was hiding his face in a hood.

The woman and I disembarked at the same bus stop; she used the front door while I used the back door. So I couldn’t miss seeing her walking in front of me in a way that intimated that she was suffering from a mental illness.  I would have felt ashamed for myself had I not used my free will to try to adopt God’s perspective on us. I walked faster, and thus I walked by her.  She looked at me, and, when I was in front of her, I looked back and saw that she was wearing a sweat shirt that had cartoon characters from the “Peanuts” comic and television shows that feature Charlie Brown and his dog, Snoopy.  “I like your shirt,” I said in a friendly tone that was genuine.  It was not that I thought I might get some heavenly reward; rather, the compassion seemed to arise quite naturally from me having assumed a perspective that has been attributed to God.

Thinking about how God looks down at us and then trying to adopt such a posture as much as we can as finite, hardly omniscient entities, and then staying in that posture for some time while watching another person (or persons) is not only done by grace. Our free-will in deciding to do this is necessary too, as it is for then deciding to approach rather than avoid the other person even if one is noxious, mentally ill, or just plain creepy. It is astonishing how quickly and dramatically anger, disgust, and the will to avoid such a person can change to kindness and compassion. If we are indeed made in God’s image, perhaps the esoteric meaning in it is that we are the only species that can self-consciously that can adopt a perspective and attitude as if we were looking in on creatures who are in Creation. That we can do so even while knowing that we too are creatures within Creation is itself astonishing, and this point is perhaps why we can assume such a posture only to some extent, yet even that is sufficient for the Kingdom of God to manifest within us, if only episode by episode, and then perhaps enough that habit kicks in and the Kingdom can gain some traction.

 

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1. Augustine, Tractates on John: Books 28-54, 40.4, trans. John W. Rettig, Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 88 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1993), 126.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.

Ideological Word Games: The Modern Weapon of Choice?

When I was young, my dad would sometimes criticize me for engaging in “word games.” Perhaps I was already parsing words; my parents and maternal grandfather were all lawyers. My last name is Worden, after all. I was raised to pronounce the name, war-den, and only after decades did it occur to me that people might spell the name as Worden rather than Warden if I pronounced it as word-n. I was the first even in the extended family to use the alternative; as Nietzsche wrote, no philosopher is a man of his time. We tend to think outside the proverbial constrained “box” because we critique assumptions and arguments (i.e., critical thinking), including those of the “boxes” that society leaves unquestionably standing as part of the status quo—the tyranny of which has repelled philosophers wetted to the idea that no stone should be left unturned, even if a society deems some stones as sacrosanct. It can be dangerous even to question the solidity of those stones, especially if they formed out of ideological controversies wherein tussling instinctual urges contesting for societal dominance. In this too, I am drawing on Nietzsche, who even viewed the content of ideas as being instinctual urges. In being willing to subject societally cherished ideas to fundamentally unique and deep scrutiny, Friedrich Nietzsche is the last, at least as of my time living in an American desert, both academically and geographically, where plenty of Nietzsche’s “herd animals” freely roamed. They were particularly vulnerable to ideological word-games in unquestioningly accepting the words from the insurgent ideologies as valid.

For example, the mindless expression used by retail employees, “Have a good one!” had become ubiquitous by 2020 in America even though no antecedent is mentioned for the pronoun, one. “Have a good what?” I would sometimes answer. The response would be even worse, such as “Whatever you want!” so I vanquished that experiment with truth. Why had “Have a good day!” or “Thanks for shopping here” succumbed to a vacuous “one”? To be sure, the grammatical error was more of an indication that business schools, like law and medical schools, should accept students for their respective first degrees after those students have earned a first degree in another school, such as that of the liberal arts and sciences, so the basics are not truncated. Certainly no passive aggression is involved in the ungrammatical expression.

Such aggression, I submit, underlies some cases of word games wherein ideological advocates insist that their respective instinctual urges, which include dominance, be accepted by adopting a questionable word-change even though it renders comparisons highly (yet invisibly!) unfair. Not by accident, the linguistic “game board” is tilted. People who do not play along with the change, perhaps because they can sniff the obvious yet hushed ideological game, can unfairly be subject to presumptuous pressure to use the new word appropriately. In short, the assertion, “That word [or comparison] is [now] inappropriate” can be used as a weapon.

For example, by 2020 the words male and female had come to be regularly extended from animals to human beings. So whereas formerly a person might ask, “Is your dog a female?” it had become proper to ask, for example, “Was the driver a female?”  The same applied to the word, male. Initially, I would answer such a derogatory question with, “You mean was the driver a woman?” In answering my question affirmatively, the person, whether a man or woman, would tacitly acknowledge that the use of the word female was based on a conformist ideology. Feminists could have used implicit comparisons, such as in the statement, “Was the driver a male or a woman?” and anti-feminists could have resorted to, “Was the driver a man or a female?” I had not heard such comparisons being made, but just in reading the two questions I can detect passive aggression. Indeed, that would likely be the purpose behind the respective wordings.

Racial hatred could also manifest through comparisons. On February 12, 2020, President Lincoln’s birthday ironically, a political reporter on National Public Radio discussing the previous day’s 2020 New Hampshire presidential primary said that the state is “mostly white so African Americans had not yet had the chance to be heard.” Then the reporter referred to Iowa and New Hampshire as “lily white.” This expression points to a racial bias, at least in regard to areas in which mostly Caucasians live. In using the actual name of the race, Caucasian, I am trying to correct for the convenient category mistake in the reporter’s comparison of whites with African Americans.” The latter term is an ethnic rather than a racial term. A Caucasian man from South Africa who has moved to American is an African American. That this term was invented by Jesse Jackson, a civil rights activist, is a hint as to the ideological impetus behind the ideologically-driven intension behind the switch from “Black,” a racial term, to “African American,” an ethnic immigrant term. The force of the ideology is responsible for the category mistake. On two occasions, I made statements in which the axis of comparison is skewed in the other direction. One interesting example is, “Caucasians and Blacks can get along.” Even in spite of the friendly idea, my acquaintance scolded me. “Don’t use Caucasian.” Yet if I had used “whites” instead, as in “Whites and Blacks can get along”—a statement that Martin Luther King likely said many times—a Caucasian with a certain ideological bias would likely have corrected me, insisting that I use “African American” rather than “Black” even though the former is not a term that refers to a race! Passive aggression fueled by an insurgent ideology can all too willingly rip through reasoning. Nietzsche would say that such reasoning is itself a tussle of instinctual urges, the most dominant in this case being one that clashes with the urge behind the ideology.

I submit that many people take words and linguistic comparisons at face level only. The real uses, at the ideological (and even instinctual urge) level, are frequently overlooked. The operative assumption is that in the selection of words, even in comparison to others, speakers and writers are ideologically neutral. The encroaching natural tendency of an ideology (and the instinctual urges behind it) is not recognized in its fullness. I submit that both the overlooking and the selection can be done unconsciously, though conscious intent in the selection can also exist. The person who feels a little uncomfortable but cannot identify why after hearing, “Was the driver a man or a female?” or “Was the driver Caucasian or Black?”---or even worse, “Was the driver a Caucasian woman or a Black male?”—unconsciously senses the ideological bias, especially if the listener’s ideology, and thus dominant urges, are at odds with the bias. The listener who knows that the comparisons are insulting or otherwise diminutive to one gender or one race also knows that passive aggression was involved. Sadly, the human “race” can be too creative and subtle in turning something into a weapon. At the very least, making specific instances of linguistic weapons transparent to other people can be done such that those instances may lose their fangs in the antiseptic of sunlight.