Takes One to Know One

 Over on my other blog, I was ranting today about what a terrible snot J.D. Vance is. 

A friend of mine read the post and messaged me afterward to convey that he sensed a certain joyless and hectoring tone in the whole thing. "I understand why you're frustrated, but could you please lower your voice?" he half-seriously remarked. 

And I admit that in re-reading the piece, I could detect the same unwholesome element he was picking up on. It's ironic, because in the piece I'd just been accusing Vance of being motivated by ressentiment (a charge I stand by); but in the very act of pointing it out I seemed at times to adopt the same tone. 

"J.D. Vance is so vicious. J.D. Vance is always backbiting," I said, in so many words. And it's true. But I sounded vituperative and backbiting myself in saying it. 

What am I supposed to do, though? J.D. Vance is helping Trump disappear people to torture prisons and black sites around the globe. He is indeed a hypocrite. He is indeed unjust. I don't have words bad enough for what he is. 

But [h]atred, even of meanness

Contorts the features.

Anger, even against injustice

Makes the voice hoarse. Oh, we

Who wanted to prepare the ground for friendliness

Could not ourselves be friendly.

—to quote Bertolt Brecht (Willett, Manheim, and Fried trans.)

It seems inevitable, that is to say, that in order to confront people like Vance and Stephen Miller, I must somehow become like them. 

All I can do is, like Brecht, pray for forbearance and understanding from "those born later," who will hopefully dwell some day in a world where they no longer have to react to people like Vance and Miller in the news every day. 

In diagnosing Vance's ressentiment, perhaps I displayed some myself. But perhaps it takes one to know one. 

Arthur Koestler devoted a whole book—Arrival and Departure—to the question of what would happen if a politically active person discovered that the root cause of all their seemingly humanitarian activism was really just some Freudian psychological complex. 

The lesson of the book, Koestler concludes, is that even if this turned out to be true—it doesn't negate the validity of one's ethical impulses just to point out they have some subconscious or biographical origin. 

So too, suppose I do have the same psychology of ressentiment that Vance and Miller do. That doesn't mean I'm wrong!