HOW TO PRAISE

    A REVOLUTIONARY APPROACH TO FREEDOM

 

[This essay was begun in Spring 2007.

It was revised February 2008.

But it remains a Work in Progress. ]

 

 

PROLOGUE

 

If he looked left, he would see the undefeated hope of a Spring sunset. But he looked straight ahead, and saw – the wall above his desk. Not even his desk, for he was staying only a month. Not only could he not-see, he couldn’t hear here either.

 

All that was in his hear-shot – was the recoil from a conversation some eighty miles and some three hundred minutes away. There was such a melancholy grandeur in his mother’s parting words – the like of which he had never read or heard in story or life – that he regretted the wound they had poured from. Pity was about to suffocate him. He shook his head and hoped for silence. Again, the day failed him

 

Suddenly, two once-heard lines were in his mind. He couldn’t remember where he had heard them, only that that first enchantment was with him again. With unusual despatch, he sought out from the half-unpacked boxes, a piece of card – cheap & grey -  a blade and a pen. He cut out a small rectangle, wrote the lines down, and stuck the card to the wall, so it was in his eye-line.

 

Twenty years and several houses later, it is still in his eye-line above his desk. 

 

In the prison of his days

Teach the free man how to praise.

 

Not many months after that first inscribing, I found the setting of the lines.

 

 

 

In Memory of WB Yeats

by

W.H. Auden

 

 

I

He disappeared in the dead of winter:

The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,

And snow disfigured the public statues;

The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.

What instruments we have agree

The day of his death was a dark cold day.

 

Far from his illness

The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,

The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;

By mourning tongues

The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

 

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,

An afternoon of nurses and rumours;

The provinces of his body revolted,

The squares of his mind were empty,

Silence invaded the suburbs,

The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

 

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities

And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,

To find his happiness in another kind of wood

And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.

The words of a dead man

Are modified in the guts of the living.

 

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow

When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,

And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,

And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,

A few thousand will think of this day

As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

 

What instruments we have agree

The day of his death was a dark cold day.

 

II

 

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:

The parish of rich women, physical decay,

Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.

Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives

In the valley of its making where executives

Would never want to tamper, flows on south

From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,

Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,

A way of happening, a mouth.

 

 

III

 

Earth, receive an honoured guest:

William Yeats is laid to rest.

Let the Irish vessel lie

Emptied of its poetry.

 

In the nightmare of the dark

All the dogs of Europe bark,

And the living nations wait,

Each sequestered in its hate;

 

Intellectual disgrace

Stares from every human face,

And the seas of pity lie

Locked and frozen in each eye.

 

Follow, poet, follow right

To the bottom of the night,

With your unconstraining voice

Still persuade us to rejoice;

 

With the farming of a verse

Make a vineyard of the curse,

Sing of human unsuccess

In a rapture of distress;

 

In the deserts of the heart

Let the healing fountain start,

In the prison of his days

Teach the free man how to praise.

 

 

 

INTRODUCTION

This book is a meditation on that sublime final couplet. Praise, as panegyric, eulogy, threnody is, by definition, not-impersonal. So it is not irrelevant to give some background material, to support the poem’s own autobiographical disclosures, before discussing its generalities.

 

In 1939 Auden was 32. After Oxford, he had enjoyed his wild, sexual awakenings in Berlin, and then gone onto to travel as widely as Byron. He was one of the few Western citizens who dared to face the truth of the inevitability of another world war. The other war he faced was the legal prohibition by his country, by his fellow nominal-Christian citizens, of the expression of his sexuality and love. He left long before war was declared. He left to find love and life. Who can fault that? And he offered to do war-related service in the US. Turing stayed in England and his genius helped save the nation:  but, because of his homosexuality, he lost his security clearance and then committed suicide.

 

In this magnificent poem, Auden shrinks from nothing. He begins by castigating the wasteland of the stock exchange and the fascist rally and the madness of Ireland, and lamenting the evacuation of the Yeats’s mind and his body’s revolt.  But he rallies to dissect the vocation of the poet, knowing clinically both its limits and its swelling potential.

 

But the final couplet is the most complex. It begins with a familiar trope – life (especially the body) being a prison. Then suddenly there is this the assertion of the most unusual strategy for freedom and release – praise – and also the possibility of acquiring this strategy – the Poet will show the Reader ‘how to praise’.

 

The paradox is that the poem ends there, the lesson doesn’t begin: until one rereads the poem and realises - there’s the lesson. The poem is an instruction manual on how to praise. It has the courage to record human ambivalence; to celebrate, but also to show contempt. He speaks of  ‘intellectual disgrace’ and the Bourse men are re-categorised as beasts: perhaps more inhuman than the ‘Beastly Hun’ of WW1 propaganda. This is my principal theme: the inseparability of the ability to praise and the ability to show contempt.

 

What makes the poem even more astonishing is that he wrote it so quickly, within a few weeks of Yeats’s death. This moral as well as technical greatness was underlined a few months later – now in wartime – by his poem for Freud. Nor are these two poems the only praise-poems he wrote. Perhaps he wrote more praise poems than any other major poet. Of course he had his duplicities and hypocrisies, but to have written so much praise is high humanity. I do not know if he wrote elsewhere on ‘how to praise’.

 

I will address the question in the following order.

 

 

Chapter 1 :  SOME EXAMPLES OF PERFECT PRAISE

These will be of the highest praise and provide a reference point.                   

 

Chapter 2 :  COMMON ENCOUNTERS WITH PRAISE

 

Part A: Common Usage & Received Wisdom

I will give an account of how most people offer praise and how they analyse praise & some related concepts. I will include some vox-pop interviews. This reveals how they were taught or at least how they learned how to praise.

 

Part B : How Not-to Receive Praise

I will describe the common rejections and evasions of praise.

 

Part C : Hesitation about Judging

Praising is judging; so to offer praise is to have made a judgement. I will look briefly at the common anxiety about judging. The theme will be developed in a later chapter.

 

Chapter 3 : THE PRAISE MATRIX

I will argue that one cannot fully understand ‘praise’ without understanding its connections to other concepts. I will state the concepts with which it is connected.

 

Chapter 4 :   PRAISE IN HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

 

Part A: Praise Realms

I will describe the realms of human life where praise might happen: and how offering praise & analysing praise varies subtly in different human activities.

 

PART B : Types of Praise

I will distinguish three types of praise.

 

Part C: : The Necessary Praise Experiences

I will argue that there are certain forms of praise that if not given at crucial development phases will produce a stunted human, however successful – rich, famous, powerful.

Following this, I will offer explanations for why a person fails to offer praise, fails to accept praise and fails to make the connections between praise and related concepts.

 

Chapter 5 : INTRODUCING CONTEMPT  via The Enjoyment Question

As I am arguing for the ability to show contempt as necessary for mental health, this chapter should begin that proof. It “needs not a ghost from the grave my Lord”  to tell us that in general people show contempt far less than they show praise. One way to explore this asymmetry is via another: that people ask the Enjoyment Question far less than they do the Distress Question. The two are asymmetries are related quite simply : praise is intended, ideally, to cause enjoyment for both persons. Some basic psychoanalytic theory will be used.

 

Chapter 6 :  THE NECESSITY OF SHOWING CONTEMPT

I put to the Reader the following observation: An ordinary person living an ordinary life will sometimes meet people who deserve the highest praise: and at other times other people who deserve utter contempt. If there is assent to this the moral puzzle is how to show contempt. Sometimes people do dare to show contempt. Some rich examples are given. I will prove that the feeling of contempt and the impulse to show it are intertwined with the desire to offer praise:  and that the disavowal of the former weakens the energy and truth of the latter.

 

Chapter 7 : MORE ON THE EXPLANATION OF HESITATION

Asymmetry, Negation (Not-P) : Evasion (Not-p & and Not-not-P)

 

Chapter 8 : MISJUDGING THE JUDGER : Some examples

For some readers Dante is the most notorious example in world literature of the didactic, judgemental writer, who brought vast resources of intellect to justify deep, abiding personal viciousness: his Godlike pen assigning enemies to eternal torment in Hell. Many centuries later Joyce chose him (with Shakespeare and Ibsen) as his literary heroes. Some critics say he emulated Dante’s judgementalism. Against such mis-readings, I will argue for Dante being the person who showed the most perfect balance of praise and contempt.

 

Chapter 9 : SOME NEW EXAMPLES OF PRAISE : POSH VOXPOP

Here I sketch an intention. Ideally, I would like to ask some of the great and good of today’s world the four key questions and then include their answers.

 

i) In your life, who do you know/have met that impressed you the most with the way they offered praise. (Not just praise to you, but also how they praised others) ?

ii) Who was the worst – for withholding praise.

iii) Who was the most judgemental?

iv) Who would you say taught you How To Praise?

 

Chapter 10  : CONCLUSIONS & FINAL TIPS ON HOW TO PRAISE

 

================================================================================

 

 

CHAPTER 1 : SOME EXAMPLES OF PERFECT PRAISE

 

1 : On Paganini  : by Anon

 

We have heard him; we have listened to him; but we feel so incompetent to convey to our readers any adequate idea of him that we are tempted to abandon the task altogether. Something, however, will be expected from us; something, therefore, we must say; and we will begin with his first appearance on the stage, which is not the least extraordinary of the wonderful points about him.

Reader, you have seen some of the portraits of Paganini; some, probably which were avowedly meant for caricatures of his person and his countenance: you have probably thought that, even for caricatures, his peculiarities were grossly exaggerated. Reader, you were under a mistake.

 

So far are they from being exaggerated caricatures, that what appears to be the most extravagant of them fails by falling short of the extent of those peculiarities. It rather seems as though Paganini has been made for a caricature of the portraits, than the portraits drawn as caricatures of Paganini. His smile on receiving the applause of the audience is the most extraordinary, the most unearthly expression that ever marked the countenance of a human being; but to form the most remote conception of it, he must be seen. We shall certainly not attempt to describe it.

 

Then his performance! It is almost as little amenable to the powers of description as his countenance. At all events we feel quite incapable of giving an adequate account of it.

 

Those of our readers who feel an interest in these matters, will, no doubt, have read in the musical publications of the day, a very full description of his extraordinary powers; his amazing power and compass on the instrument; his pizzicato accompaniments; his playing two parts at the same time; his sonatas on one string; and a great variety of other musical miracles which he works.

But these, astonishing as they undoubtedly are, must not be compared with his genuine performances on the instrument, unaided by trick of any description. Of this kind of music he unfortunately gives far too little; there was little or none in the first evening's performance; but last night he gave a piece entitled, if we recollect aright, for we have not the bill before us, "Thema sulla prighiera di Pietro Peremita", which, in our humble judgment, was worth all the rest of his evening's performance. It is an adagio, full of soul and expression; and gave full scope to his powers. In playing this piece his tones were the most extraordinary that we ever heard from any musical instrument. They seemed to be susceptible of all the varied intonation of the human voice; to be capable of expressing all the varieties of human passions; in short, they wanted nothing but articulation to form a complete language.  [(14 Jan 1832: The Guardian :  17/1/4 )]

 

I came across this some years ago in The Guardian. It was written almost two centuries back. For me it sets the gold standard of praise. Of the three modalities of pleasure – relief, joy and release – only the last effects a rearrangement of one’s bearings, taking one out of oneself, and bringing into being a new self, looking at the world anew. Nothing is the same again: all one’s former judgements are adjusted. The other crucial characteristic is an absolute humility in the writers who are trying to describe the metamorphosis. A person reading this is utterly charmed by the confession of insufficiency, and a wish to know how.

 

One is reminded of that wonderful moment when one sees a young child straining to find its first words. On a darker note, one recalls the famous rumour about Paganini (later applied to the 20C guitarist, Robert Johnson) that he had acquired his divine skill by selling his soul to the devil.

 

2: On Virgil : by Statius in Dante’s Purgatorio

 

“The Aeneid, which to me was mother,

To me was nurse of song : if plucked asunder

From that rich fount, I’d ne’er have weighed a feather.

And to have had the joy of living yonder

When Virgil lived, I’d lie a whole sun more

Beyond my term, in exile and face under.

 

A modern comparison of intensity of gratitude is found in Albert Camus’s Noble Prize speech encomium to his primary school teacher.

 

 

3: On Juliet : by Shakespeare

 

He gives Romeo a similar quantum Copernican jolt..

“Oh she doth teach the torches to burn bright.”.

The most interesting word in this line of medieval alliteration is ‘teach’. He now knows what he hadn’t learned from his self-indulgent word-wooing of Rosalind.

 

 

 

4: On Shakespeare : by Burgess

 

In his lovely book about Shakespeare’s love-life, Nothing Like the Sun, Anthony Burgess has the twenty-something apprentice-playwright, on the make in London theatre, make the following remark on his older contemporary, Kydd:

“Was he not some kind of God: did he not write ‘A Spanish Tragedy’”.

Burgess with brilliant conciseness sketches the wonder that decades later will produce Hamlet. By a cunning ironic trope, Burgess’s words of praise for Kydd are really an expression of awe at Shakespeare’s skill. 

 

 

 

5: On Pre-Newtonians by Newton & On Newton by Many

 

'If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants’

 

Newton’s sublime expression of humility doesn’t name any of the giants! Later generations struggled to find words of sufficient praise for him, the true giant.

 

'A man such as Newton, the like of whom is scarcely to be found in ten centuries, is the truly great man, and the politicians and conquerors, in which no period has been lacking, are usually nothing more than illustrious criminals.' [Voltaire]

 

‘In one person, he combined the experimenter, the theorist, the mechanic, and, not least, the artist in exposition.'  [Einstein, 1932]

 

‘The last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago.'  [Keynes, 1942]

 

We should add that unless we remember that praise is incommensurable across different kinds of imagination, we will say things like:

'Newton was a great man [but] it would take many Newtons to make one Milton.'  [Coleridge]

 

 

6:  On Rimbaud & Pele : by Cantona

 

"An artist in my eyes, is someone who can lighten up a dark room. I have never and will never find difference between the pass from Pele to Carlos Alberto in the final of the World Cup in 1970 and the poetry of the young Rimbaud, who stretches cords from steeple to steeple and garlands from window to window. There is in each of these human manifestations an expression of beauty which touches us and gives us a feeling of eternity."

This is the high-proud Eric Cantona. Praise is intrinsically about separation; so this quote is wonderful for the phrase I have highlighted, which refuses separation. Such generosity though is more easily done across disparate domains of expression such as football and poetry. The Stretford End faithful  could only find awe-filled sounds not words of praise for him.

 

“Ooh, Ahh, Cantona

Oooh-Ahh Cantona.”

 

 

8: On SYLVIE GUILLEM

[find quote]

 

9: On Babette’s Feast : by the Grimly Ascetic Christians

 

“The best meal we have ever had”.

Their bonhomie, suspension of envy & spite and their inchoate lust, soon dissipates. But it was a start. As Oscar Wilde said:

 “After a good meal one can forgive anything, even one’s relations”

 

10: On Hendry : by Jimmy White

 

“I didn’t mind losing to Stephen Hendry: because he played like a God”

The grandeur of this compliment is heightened when we recall that White lost the World Championship final seven times, once on his birthday.

 

 

COMMENT

At the most rudimentary level there are only two types of objects that are praisable:

 

i)  Intended Manifestations of human skill – Paganini, Pele, Shakespeare, the Test-tube-Baby scientists etc. The show of skill is based on a Miltonic ‘shunning delights and living laborious days’. Implicit in the praise is the highest respect for such lengthy self-denial as well as admiration for the skill displayed.

 

ii) Chance Manifestations of nature  viz natural beauty – the Grand Canyon, the South Pole, the Northern Lights, coral reefs, tigers, bacteria etc: and then people -  Helen of Troy, the Shulamite (Song of Songs), Tadzio (Death in Venice). These people are born lucky: though it obviously requires skill to develop muscle tone, do fetching make-up and wear clothes stylishly.

 

There is a strange, special case – whereby we praise anyone who has made us happy in some way. I will say more on this below.

 

CHAPTER 2 : COMMON ENCOUNTERS WITH PRAISE

 

In this chapter I will describe and offer a preliminary analysis of how the word and action of praise are used in ordinary life. Sometimes I will use constructed examples with the (vaguely gendered) adult characters: Farb, Ludo, Menza and Shri. The following moves, conversational and written, are among the most common. All of us will have made them or received them.

 

PART A) COMMON MOVES of PRAISE

 

i:  THE PHRASES

‘High praise’ ‘highest praise’ and ‘feint praise’ are used as follows.

 

Farb offered Shri high praise.

Menza spoke of Ludo’s work with the highest praise.

Shri’s review included some feint praise.

 

The last example seems to be an act of praise like the first two: but it is more complex than that. An extreme version reveals a cunning complexity.

 

The review damned with feint praise Shri’s acting.

 

The moiety of compliment is a stalking horse for a near contemptuous attack. So a gesture of praise may also include a desire and intention to show the opposite judgement and emotion. One of the themes of this book is to foreground how much ambivalence, the present of its opposites and contraries, there may be in praise. A piece of 19C English civility became shorthand for both this kind of attack but of weaker malice:  ‘curate’s egg’.

 

The critics agreed Ludo’s symphony was a curate’s egg.

 

Often the ‘joke’ is explained.

 

The critics agreed Ludo’s symphony was a curate’s egg: good in parts.

 

This of course wrecks the reference and the joke: it being a category mistake to say the egg is divisible in this way.

 

ii) MELODIOUS & ODIOUS COMPARISONS

 

Again, this is not a simple gesture.  There are three persons in the story: the Judge, the Subject and the Comparator. A negative or positive quality is introduced by the Judge and used to define the Subject via the Comparator. There are four possible outcomes with the Subject or the Comparator receiving the higher praise.

 

            COMPARITOR                                                 SUBJECT

 

1:      Has Positive Quality                         Has More/Most Positive Quality

eg.

Zeus (as Judge) is much given to this manoeuvre: saying to Hera:  “This mortal-woman or this goddess is ravishingly beautiful, but you are more so”. Hera is rarely convinced. Deep in each god’s and every human being’s narcissistic heart is Gore Vidal’s dictum: “It is not enough that I succeed, others must fail!”

 

 

 

2:      Has Positive Quality                         Has Less/None Positive Quality

eg.

When the quality was presidential or even senatorial aptitude, Senator Bentsen (as Judge) famously shredded Senator Quayle’s attempt to make a flattering self-comparison, by interrupting him with withering tone: “You’re no Jack Kennedy” .  

 

This is not remotely innocent praise: an absent person is praised again but only as a way of scorning and humiliating a present person. That was politics. In the bedroom, the betrayed woman achieves her revenge:

 

“I got me a brand new box of matches.

 And what he knows,

You ain’t got time to learn.    [Nancy Sinatra These Boots]

 

The second example is a brilliant use of metaphor: a match as a man with infinite, thrillingly dangerous, sexual knowledge & skill.

 

A commonly used limiting-case of this move is when people say of their recent night out: “It wasn’t the best film, play, sermon, football-match, one-night-stand, I’ve been to ” : without ever giving a brief or even plausible account of the great comparator.

 

 

3:      Has Negative Quality                      Has More/Most  Negative Quality

 

In the 18C comedy of manners, elegance, complaisance, je ne sais quoi  - and by implication their opposites and contraries - were the qualities by which the high bourgeoise judged each other. I’ve always liked Sheridan’s Lady C’s judgement of another aristo. “Oh ruder than Goth”.

 A simpler example is to say someone “Out-Herods Herod” [Hitler/Pol Pot etc]

 

 

 

4:      Has Negative Quality                      Has Less/None Negative Quality

 

When, in the modern comedy of manners Seinfeld, Kramer tells his friends he has seen in a locked hospital-room an illegal, genetic-freak, a Pig-Man, the neurotic George (as Judge) immediately imagines the benefits of such monstrous hybrids in society. “I’ll get more dates. Women will say of me – at least he’s no pig-man!” . Jerry deflates him with the truth: that far more women will be drawn to the novelty date.

 

One should include the observation that for some people, any kind of public notice, including severe negative judgements, even scorn, is considered useful. This is the absolute opportunist’s position – there is no such thing as bad publicity.

 

 

PART B : How Not-to Receive Praise

 

A moment’s reflection will persuade one of the truth that the only way to respond to (genuinely) offered praise is to say in a glad and grateful tone, with a warmed smile and an open body,

“Thank you. [I’m delighted, honoured,touched]”

So the puzzle is why do the following exchanges happen so much more often?

 

P: You wear that beautiful dress so well.

R: What, this old thing: and I haven’t showered.

 

P: What a display of skill! Well done!

R: It’s nothing! Anyone can do it. You could, I’m sure.

P: You’re really very good at that.

R: What do you know!

 

The most tragic honeymoon in the world. A sated & happy ex-virgin says:

P: That was wonderful.

R:  I’m not here to impress you. [adds] Am I dad?    [American Dad : Series 1 2005]

 

 

PART C : HESITANT JUDGES

 

i) THE SWISS DEFENCE : FAULT NOONE

 

Some persons are anxious to add to praise a qualification that they are not also blaming anyone at all.

 

“In praising Ludo, I’m not criticising Menza or Farb.”

 

Of course there may be circumstances where a comment on Menza & Farb is irrelevant to any comment/judgement of Ludo. But some people will say this even when all three are in a connected story/moral dilemma. My point is that this reflex bid for neutrality reveals a profound anxiety in the speaker that uttering praise in the world, can bring into the world, however unintentionally, the opposites and contraries of praise. They fear that the good-energy of praise will somehow (magically) unleash the bad-energy of attack – and thereby induce counter-attack.

 

 

ii) THE CHRISTIAN CAUTION : QUIETIST OUT-SWISSING

 

We saw above that, for some people, just as in the midst of life we are in death, so in the midst of praise we might be making the murderous manoeuvre of blame. To defend against the anxiety that this causes, the ‘Swiss’ praiser declares absolute neutrality. But for some people this is not enough. There is a retreat to absolute quietism. They take great comfort, and in fact absolute justification, for this moral position, by saying they are imitating God-the-Son.

Judge not, that ye be not judged.  For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.  [Matthew 7.1-2]

It is important to note that this particular counsel of perfection, in verse 1, declares an absolute disallowance, an absolute withdrawal of the permission to judge. This implies, both logically and psychologically, an absolute disallowance of thinking – the defining characteristic of humankind – the ability to discriminate, construct valid chains of connected reasons, and to make distinctions in the virtue and vice of any human action or thought.

 

It is two thousand years of this counsel that gives, even to atheists, a feeling of glory when they say to others “You are being judgemental (again)!” for it always includes the self-praise “I never am”.

 

I do understand that in linguistics honourable description must always trump prescriptivism: the meaning with which a word is used now, and used by most people, is more significant than the nostalgic strictures of hordes of armchair pedants and a few grammarians. eg. Most people, when criticised, say “I refute that” without offering anything else. What they are doing is rejecting the criticism: and trying for fancy-clever points by using a lahdedah word like ‘refute’ instead of the plain word ‘reject’. Of course this still leaves the intellectual and moral task to furnish a logical refutation: and it is a task rarely done.  Even if ‘judgmental’ ought to mean ‘simply connected to judging’, just as ‘sacramental’ means ‘simply connected to the sacraments/sacred”, most people use it to mean  ‘mean’, ‘unkind’, ‘unfair, ‘malicious’, ‘vindictive’, ‘hyper-critical’. With such associations, to describe oneself as ‘non-judgemental’ is to make a bid for sainthood.

 

It is difficult to know what Christ was doing with this counsel. It is on a different intellectual plane and offers a different strategy for living than his three mighty castigations of hypocrisy. Paradoxically, the first in fact follows on from the disallowance of thinking.

 

1: And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye. [ibid 3-5]

 

2:  He that is without sin among you,let him first cast a stone at her.

[John 8.7]

 

3: But I say unto you, That whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment: and whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be in danger of the council: but whosoever shall say, thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire.  [Matthew 5.22]

 

The counsel, fitting a sermon, contains consequentialist rather than deontological ethics. Three dangers, including the temporal and the eternal, are cited as a way of bringing the faithful into line: the judgement, the council and hellfire. Though the three are defined vaguely, the terrifying precis is “Don’t do X, or one or all three will happen to you.” The Sermoniser’s skill lies precisely in the vagueness. The audience is not being invited into a Hobbesian commonwealth, where men must perform their covenant’s made and there is a rule of law applying to all, including the sovereign: but rather they are to be persuaded of mysterious forces and entities that are eternally tracking disbelief and sin, and will surely exact punishment.

 

 

But verses 3-5 enjoin upon the faithful the task of judgement forbidden in verses 1-2!  The following logical operation is expected to accompany any public pronouncement by me that “Person-P is at fault/sin-FS.”

Four more judgements are required: 

 

i ) I judge myself to be or to have been guilty of FS.

ii ) I judge that the community to which P and I belong, with its customs, rules and laws - canon & civil - would fairly judge me to more guilty of FS than P.

iii) I am religiously and morally obliged to atone for FS, as soon as possible: and regardless of what actions of atonement P decides.

iv ) I should not castigate P, publicly or privately, before I have atoned for FS.

 

This seems like a useable rule of life, doable, honourable, fair, Christian! It induces hesitation, compassion and generosity into each person’s impulse to judge others, whether from motives of benign instruction, conversion, malice or a distraction from one’s similar faults. The corollary is that the most hysterically punitive of moralists are usually exposed as rank hypocrites.

It could have been predicted at the time, 1996, but it has only recently been confirmed by confession, that Senator S, orchestrating the Republican’s biblically charged pursuit of Clinton’s wayward penis, was in those very months regularly committing adultery.

 

Unfortunately it is surrounded by three contrary sentiments/injunctions. The Stone parable attenuates, and in some interpretations entirely displaces, the strategically complex mote-beam life-counsel. “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.”  is a straw-man argument.  Within the Judaeo-Christian theological paradigm, asserting the doctrine of original sin, the precondition of being without sin, can never be fulfilled. The final caution, from Matthew, seems to allow anger with cause, but then disallows its common expression ‘thou fool’. In ordinary life, most people say, in a puzzled and vexed tone, to the person at-fault/in-sin, adult or child, things like :  “Are you crazy? What the hell’s wrong with you? You prat!”

 

How many worshippers, singing or confessing in churches round the world this evensong, know how Raca fits in?!

 

Given the prohibitions of his day it was daring of Shakespeare to take a title from Christ’s caution – Measure for Measure.  But the dramatic parable by this myriad minded man, secularists would say as wise as Rabbi Jesus, is so garbled that it is known as a Problem Play. Angelo is exposed as a great a hypocrite as Senator X. But the Duke is no saint: he is rather too similar to Marlowe’s troubled celibate, Dr Faustus. Shakespeare was greater at delineating mortal fault and folly than at presenting believable contrition and plausible reconciliation. Even in his final play The Tempest, the reconciliations are psychologically flawed and false. (Please see my essay on this site.)

 

WHO IS ENTITLED TO JUDGE THE LIMITING CASE?

 

There is no clash of civilization equal to genocide. Wars - economic, religious, cultural, and military - however total and brutal, might contain some mutual understanding and compassion. But as Primo Levi was told by his genocidal captors in Auschwitz “Here there is no ‘why’!”  How to act during a genocidal project, is the hardest moral question for those threatened with annihilation and for those who have said they have some care & concern for them. For those who were fortunate to be born after such terrifying moral puzzles, there still remains the moral task of judging.

 

Of the countless controversies, the most recent centres on Nemirovsky, a French Jew.

“She wrote to Marshall Pétain, head of the Vichy government, stating that despite being Jewish by birth, she herself disliked the Jews and hence should be given special status. Pétain never replied. Her husband wrote frantically to the German ambassador in Paris after Irène's arrest, pleading for her to be released: "[Even though my wife is of Jewish descent, she does not speak of the Jews with any affection whatsoever in her works."  The letter didn't save his wife - she died from typhus in Auschwitz on August 17 1942. Michel was arrested and gassed in Auschwitz on November 6.” 

[Stuart Jeffries: The Guardian : Feb 2007 : my emphases]

 

The plea for special status at any time is a declaration of separation from one’s moral community, sometimes rather like a bid for divinity: but here it is like begging the devil. After reading their pleas, I wondered what she and her husband said to Anne Frank, or Kafka’s sisters or any of the Jews who showed them human, even specifically Jewish, kindness in those final months. I was shocked by the pleas and, this is also shocking, I was glad they failed.

 

Carmen Calil, the English writer commented:

"She certainly mixed with people who were anti-semites, but she ignored it. She certainly made a lot of mistakes, but given her times and her circumstances, they might well be excusable. Who are we to judge?".  (ibid: my emphasis)

 

Doesn’t this seem instantly kinder and wiser than my remark. The Reader will have made the connection between  “Who are we to judge?" and Jewish Jesus’s counsel: “Judge not, that ye be not judged.”  But perhaps may not have noticed that it also commits her to anti-intellectual, amoral quietism. Alas, this position is contradicted by her previous hesitant remark – ‘might well be S’  is a mealy-mouthed way to say “S” – that Nemirovsky’s distancing herself from Jews was absolutely excusable. The moot point is whether Calil actually did believe this. She had after all written a very moving biography of her therapist, who went in the other direction: took on the burden of guilt of her unrepentant anti-semitic father, and killed herself. 

 

This sketch of common usage and of the complex, magical, often unconscious, emotions involved shows what great need there is for more thinking about where praise fits in to other forms of human judgement.

 

The straining plaster of spurious reason covering the ulcer of unacknowledged emotion.  [check quote]

 

A Different Line of Judgement

 

We are grateful to caricaturists for the way their wild and whirling lines of castigation of the public hypocrisies of the powerful give us the relief of humour and dilutes our impotent exasperation. It takes a certain kind of courage to draw those lines of judgement day after day. Rowson is a master. At the end of a deeply, moving autobiographical article about the three women who brought him up, his nerve, like Calil’s, fails him, and he adds

“I’m not going to judge”. Like Calil, he already has.

 

 

 

 

Chapter 3 :  THE PRAISE MATRIX

 

The difficulty is finding a way of saying what kind of connections there are between concepts.  My use of the word ‘matrix’ comes from mathematics, a ‘collection’ of numbers, but I am mindful that for many people it might mean the alternative-world of the eponymous film. We might talk instead of a ‘spectrum’ or a ‘ladder’ of concepts. People speak of an idea being ‘the other side of the coin’ of another idea. This could be expanded into speaking of a cube/die of connected concepts. It was reassuring to read recently in The Observer a scholar of Milton and our best writer of political comedy Ianucci foregrounding the worth of the full spectrum:

“Part of the creative joy of English is the richness of its vocabulary; it's a great splurge of words designating small differences, opposites, ranges within a spectrum. Once we start eradicating one half of the spectrum, forbid a whole set of opposites, banish differences, then we have a dying language. Yet everywhere we turn, we're no longer allowed to think in negatives.” [25/3/7]

 

 Let me give an example of placing-in-its-connections  another word as ordinary as ‘praise’ – ‘shame’

 

The Shame Matrix

 

Some citizens, as well as politicians, are proud to affirm that Britain is now a multicultural society. Others are more sceptical and point to many fault-lines and mutual misunderstandings. One basic distinction among British citizens is that whereas most of the Anglo-Saxon and Caribbean population have their moral roots in what is called a guilt-culture, most Asians – Indian, Pakistani, Chinese, Japanese – are driven by a shame-culture. The great anthropologist Jack Goody argues this is a weak untenable observation. People in both types of culture speak of these two concepts as forming a pair. But ‘shame’ and ‘guilt’ are neither corollaries nor opposites. It is difficult to imagine them on a philosophical square-of-opposition. But let’s try:

 

       SHAME                                   GUILT

 

RESPECT/FACE            INNOCENCE/SALVATION

 

At the least ‘guilt’ and ‘shame’ are contraries to each other: and they each have an opposite, and a complex opposite at that. For Indo-Pakistanis the opposite of ‘shame’ (sharam) is izzat, loosely translated as ‘respect’, but including ideas of ‘personal integrity’ and ‘family honour’. So Rushdie can call his satire on Pakistani corruption Shame. For Sino-Japanese, the parallel positive term we translate as ‘face’. In the secular paradigm of the law, ‘guilt’ takes the opposite ‘innocence’. Given the doctrine of original sin - guilt from proto-parental transgression in Paradise - there is no state of theological innocence even for newborn babies: so the opposite is ‘salvation’.

That much is plain description of the common use of the words. We can also place these words in a different setting. eg psychoanalytic terms. In his developmental schema Erikson connected them as follows, introducing other abstract nouns:

 

Doubt/ Shame   v    Autonomy

        Guilt          v     Initiative

 

As I wrote a longer explanation about the pair in my book Guilt, I won’t repeat it here. What is worth repeating is my fundamental point that accepting that words are precisely connected to other words, in the same matrix, on the same spectrum, in the same collection etc is only half the task. In addition to this intellectual assent there must be the much, much harder task of becoming aware of one’s emotional difficulty with the main concept or any of those it is in connection with. Only then will an adult use these words both accurately and with the appropriate tone and affect. Even clever, successful people are not immune to this difficulty. They, for sure, will mostly use the words in the correct way, but there will often be a residue of complex and difficult emotions affecting the tone in which they speak or the goodwill with which they hear the words. One way for the Reader to evaluate the conceptual pattern/matrix I am about to propose is to pause for a while and try to note the feeling each word/concept produces, and perhaps even the immediate memory that has burst upon them.

 

The Praise Matrix

 

   JUDGING               PRAISE               AWE                                    LOVE                   CORDIALITY         

 

BYSTANDING         CONTEMPT          INDIFFERENCE                   HATE              OPPORTUNISM    

 

This might look daunting, and remind the reader of the terrors of school chemistry – Mendelieff’s Table of Elements:  or of history – family trees of Prussian monarchs.  An ordinary person might know the word ‘sulphur’ and even be able to use it reasonably well. But a person who knows the Periodic Table knows how sulphur connects to other some elements and not others, and thereby produces everything from sulphuric acid to farts to cures for rheumatism. Similarly only a person who has looked at the lineage of 19C monarchs and at ancient literature will know how many kinsmen and women were on opposing sides during the First World War: and that this echoed the divided kinsmen fighting in the great ancient battle in the Gita.

 

 So it is important to keep in mind that these are very-ordinary concepts, in daily use and heard every day in the family, at school and in all work-places, leisure-places, worship-places, even Parliament. Each of us will have heard and seen them along the way:  even if one has not been taught them carefully. So each of us uses the words in some way and, most importantly, we do know which of them push-the-buttons protecting one’s fragile ego.

 

To reprise, I am arguing that for an adult to know clearly how the praise-action & the  praise-concept  work, s/he must also know :

 

a) these nine other very-ordinary concepts,

b) the affects each of them generate in thought and action,

c) and how uncontrollably quickly the energy-of-affect related to one concept can get redirected towards another affect, such that one’s initial intention (towards another person) becomes significantly more complex.

 

The list of connectible concepts is not exhausted above: but this set is quite enough to be going on with. And, given that the concepts are so ordinary, I hope it is not necessary to ponderously define each. The complexity lies in how people connect or fail to connect their understanding of some or all of them.

 

The most obvious connection is that all the words on the other upper-line are concepts that have a positive (or good) feel about them: and all on the

lower-line have a negative feel. For most people ‘judging’ has more negative than positive associations: Crufts & Chlesea Flower Show judges – good; Oscars & Booker Prize judges – slightly bent: judging teachers, government officials, sports referees – bastards! I am proposing that it is not enough to just use the ‘nice’ words: a life-counsel given by some mothers, teachers and managers “If you can’t say something nice about someone, say nothing.”  This is of course the (Christian) bystander’s position. My dissension begins from the observation that unless one can aptly & fairly use the lower-line words even one’s nice words will be insufficient, not-nice-enough.

 

I will say more on this in the next chapter.

 

 

 

CHAPTER 4 : PRAISE IN HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

 

PART A : PRAISE REALMS

We are born into a family of other-people, and are introduced to other-people realms : play, school/university, rent-work, sports/pastimes, arts, worship, politics, war. In each realm, one might remain as learner, or one might develop into an adept practitioner, or an administrator, or leader or innovator. The activities will engage one’s mind and body (and soul) in different proportions and intensities. All groups, communities and societies soon establish what kinds of action are forbidden, even imprisonable, and equally importantly criteria for praise and prizes: cups, Oscars, medals etc. In daily life one moves through countless occasions in these realms when praise might happen.

 

PART B : THE TWO TYPES OF PRAISE

 

Let us begin with the very basic distinction between two types of praise:

Criterion-based and norm/satisfaction-based. 

 

[This might remind the Reader of the terms in the annual controversy over A-level marking: whether the spin is criterion-referenced or norm-referenced. Criterion-Referenced is when it is predetermined what level of knowledge is required for an B-grade: and if in a given year sixty percent of the cohort show that level (criterion) of knowledge, then sixty per cent get B-grade. Whereas Norm-Referenced is when it is predetermined that in any cohort there will be only ten percent getting B-grades (and say 5% getting A-grade and 40% to fail etc]

 

1: Criterion-based Praise is the easiest to understand. For any human action, criteria can be given for how accurately or efficiently or elegantly, the action can be done. Praise is due according to how well the action was done: kicking a ball, raising a soufflé, making a film, doing CPR, landing on the moon, etc. It may be true that praise is due and it may also be true that most or even all people agree praise is due: but it can still be a further ordinary truth about life, that many people won’t offer praise.

 

 

2: Norm/satisfaction-based Praise is separable from criterion-based praise. The crucial experience is of satisfaction: that is why & where the line, the norm, is drawn. What happens is that Person-X becomes aware that Person-Y’s mere presence makes him/her feel safe, content, hopeful, excited, in a phrase - satisfyingly calm and ready for life. This is followed by a sense of gratitude. Finally this mélange of feelings, and their attendant thoughts, metamorphoses into X’s declarations of praise of person-Y.  So this praise is almost an epiphemomenon of gratitude itself an epiphenomenon of satisfaction. This is a curious but ordinary impulse.

 

BABIES & GODS

 

The two most intense satisfactions of this kind relate to beings beyond ordinary mutual dialogue and of course beyond ordinary appraisal criteria - babies and gods. Parents do not shower praises on their baby for what the baby does well or rather only when they are ‘teaching’. Absolutely prior and always transcending such praise for skill (smiling/walking/eating porridge/potty etc), is praise of the baby for just-being-there. Only first parenthood brings us to this new wonder. Here are two examples of coming and not-coming into this knowledge and praise-experience.

 

a) In the 1994 film Quiz Show  the young brain-box and tv-celebrity, Charles van Doren, decides to visit the family home. He arrives after midnight. His old dad comes into the kitchen, delighted to see him. Perhaps because he knows he is already steeped in corruption, or just because he fancies it, he raids the fridge for a favourite childhood snack.

“I don’t think there can be any greater pleasure than chocolate cake and cold milk”  he says between blissful wolf-bites.

His father smiles and says: “You’ll know when you have children.”

Alas, his son is too far-gone to be swayed.

 

b) A thirty-something don has been ravished by the wonder of pregnancy and the first few months of her son’s life. As she contemplates returning to work and the necessity of childcare she writes (to me, a friend):

“I feel as if I have been given the best library book in the world, and now I must return it” .

 

Similarly believers in gods have arrived at wonder at and gratitude for their god(s) separable from any testing of the god(s). In fact, most theologies specifically prohibit testing and appraising God’s skills. To the dismay of atheists and those of weaker faith, some – like Job – will not stint in their praise and wonder at god even as their lives, and all they held dear, are smashed. Praise of (Mother) Nature is a simulacrum of praise of gods.

 

(Dr Russell, the mother above, later made the very interesting observation that some parents use praise as a form of control – minting & over-using phrases such as ‘good sitting’. This dampening of the child’s almost boundless motility is not quite instruction, encouragement or compliment but almost abuse of the child’s need for attention, approval and soothing.)

 

PART C : THE NECESSARY PRAISE EXPERIENCES

I propose that there are certain distinguishable gestures of praise that are necessary to the formation of a hopeful and generous adult. The corollary is that the absence of some of them will bring into adulthood a bitter and spiteful adult, no matter how much worldly success they attain. Even more perilously, the absence of some of them will result in a psychopath. It is crucial to keep in mind that one might never have attained fame or riches or power, but because one received these six gestures one has/had a deeply satisfying, even great, ordinary life.

 

 

The SIX INTENSITIES of PRAISE IN HUMAN LIFE

 

1) You’re wonderful! I am so lucky and happy to have you!

 (Spoken by one’s family-member)

 

There are countless books on child rearing : but in only one is there this piece of undeniable wisdom:  “What every baby/child needs is at least one person who thinks it is bloody marvellous!”  [Leith]  This is a gesture of validation or affirmation of the child’s intrinsic worth : it is not contingent upon the child doing anything, being a future child-prodigy or high-earner etc.

I have asked many counselling clients from 20-40, the question to which this ought to have been an answer 20/40 years earlier:

“Do you feel you have a right to be?”

 Most answer “No” , because they never had this experience. Tragically, some said they knew they weren’t wanted.

 

[Ms Western remarked on this criterion: “That’s why people have dogs”]

 

2) You’ve done that task originally and brilliantly!

(Spoken by one’s teacher)

 

This is of course contingent upon one’s efforts, over hours or years.

It feels so good to hear when one is ten. It still feels so good, even better really, when one hears it at fifty from one’s teacher of sixty or ninety.

 

3) You’re great, the best!

 (Spoken by an audience of 10 or 1000 or even 1 million)

 

It’s nice to have a few or many strangers say ‘you’re great’ whether they understand your work or not. But it’s a joy of far lesser intensity than from two or three  experts or innovators who have a good idea of how you are trying to be creatively original.

 

4) Please join our team!

(Spoken by the manager of the best team)

 

In some circumstances, the teacher in Experience-2 above may also have the judgement and power to say this. Obviously it feels different, incrementally more intense, if the team-manager here is even more talented than the great teacher in 2: whether in the same team or another one.

 

5) You’re a sex-god/dess!

(Spoken by the person whose body one wants).

 

This is a composite of (1) and (2). Initially the person must want your body because your body, in Blake’s phrase, satisfies for them, “the lineaments of gratified desire”. And it must be added that your lineaments may be nothing like the society-standard! But this necessary condition is not, on its own, a sufficient condition for that highest praise to be said to one. One’s body must be able to satisfy one’s lover’s body, in the way that one’s lover had always imagined and hoped a sex-god would. Again the satisfaction may be nothing like the sex-manual standard.

 

6) You’re saved, and will be with me forever!

 (Spoken by one’s Deity)

 

Obviously this is not relevant to atheists. For Christians, the reference point is Christ saying it to the instantly-converted good-thief on the cross.

 

 

 

HOW BAD ARE THESE WORDS?

 

It is one kind of aching life-long wound never to have heard these praises. But it does feel like one is being murdered slowly to have heard their opposites, day after day from childhood.

 

1b: We didn’t plan to have you and we still regret it.”

 eg Mrs Sondheim (on her deathbed) to Stephen.

 

 

2b:   “You’ve done that all wrong –again!”

 eg. any parent, teacher, manager, priest/guru/rabbi – anywhere in the world.

 

 

3b:    “You are such a loser!”

eg. your ‘best’ friend, more often than your enemy.

 

 

4b:    “We don’t want you in our team”

It’s bad enough in the playground when your peers are picking teams, and you are picked or, rather grudgingly, accepted, last. Imagine if both captains say – No you can’t play at all!

 

 

5b:  “You’re not a sex-god like him/her!”

In King Lear Regan says about her husband, but not to her husband: 

O the difference of man and man.

My fool usurps my body.

In real life many men & women – of whatever sexual orientation - have put in this knife into the their lover’s loins. When Lord Arnold discovers his wife inflagante he challenges her lover Matty Groves to fight, and easily slays him. But she still has the killer line:

“I’d rather kiss from dead Matty’s lips

Than all your hidery”  [folk song]

 

 

6b) “You are forever damned”

        eg: As Mephistopheles says to Faust. And of course any Pope/Ayatollah.

 

 

COMMENT

Some might say that I have just produced more counsels of perfection, with all they misery they entail. I don’t think I have. The six positive intensities do most good in the version above. But there could be weaker praise which keeps one going. I’d still like to say this is not-good-enough to produce a fully-rounded, hopeful adult. Similarly, I’d like to say that their frequent omission and the frequent attacks of the negative intensities (insults) are

quite-bad-enough to utterly wreck a person’s sense of hope and joy. The phrase “good-enough” as an aspiration-marker of ordinary, worthwhile life comes from Winnicott. Less well known is his boldness in acknowledging the ordinariness of mental and physical sensations (brief)hate -  of mothers for their babies, and therapists for their patients. This must be worked through and not become bad enough to actually attack.

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 5 : INTRODUCING CONTEMPT VIA THE ENJOYMENT QUESTION

 

The rarely asked question – Why is it easier to praise than blame/show contempt? – is a plausible cover for the deeply known fact – praising feels safer than blaming. This truth was bedded into early unconscious in all sorts of ways. Among these is the parable-like childhood folk-tale of the

power-contest between the Sun and Wind – to get a mortal to take off his coat. Praise always includes this seductive disrobing – if only of the other person’s reflex anger at life.

 

The primary fact of individual experience is instinctual impatience - what I want, I want right now. [The songwriter Roger Waters makes a charming joke on this in his album title “What God wants, God gets”. ] The task of growing up and maintaining maturity is to master this each day, and many times each day, forever. The primary fact of couple/group experience is instinctual anxiety created by the awareness of an imperfect control of the other person, whom one needs for some satisfaction. The task of growing up and maintaining maturity is to learn how to share, and how to wait so that the other can make one a gift of what one wants.

 

Let us look at a related common experience of asymmetrical response. People ask the Enjoyment Question far less frequently than the Distress Question. A moment’s reflection will reassure the Reader that this is not a careless digression: the enjoyment question is often not-asked precisely so that praise need not be offered.

 

This Chapter is substantially my essay [2002] :  “Happy Now : On the Enjoyment Question”

 

In summary : the Enjoyment Question is simply :

”What have you done recently that you enjoyed: I’d like to hear about it.?”

I argue that if a person, let us say a 25 year old,  has four people -  a parent, a partner, a friend, and  a colleague or a divine or just four ordinarily sane adults – who regularly ask him/her the Enjoyment Question, then he/she wouldn’t need therapy. The corollary is that no matter how many people ask one the Distress Question – “What’s made you unhappy and unwell?”, it doesn’t make up for the absence of the regular Enjoyment Question. One might get riches, fame, and power but one will still miss that question being asked genuinely: and so will probably need therapy.

 

 

Chapter 6: THE NECESSITY OF SHOWING CONTEMPT

 

I have longed believed there is an economy of the human heart: which is probably only a fanciful way of echoing Freud’s mighty ideas about psychic economy. If one proposes as a Quasi-Newtonian Law that The expression of any human emotion includes the suppression of its opposite, one is perilously close to the comic socio-physics which gives as his Fourth Law You can always trust a man who tucks his jumper into his underpants. As I am trying to show how contempt is in a dialectic with praise, it might be valuable to turn now to the darker concept. I will give some examples of contempt: and then offer an analysis.

 

NON-VERBAL CONTEMPT

a)   Lip – usually top-left creased and raised: meaning ‘ you are worthless’

Middle-finger : mostly men, but some women also : meaning ‘fuck-this and fuck off!’

Pinkie – usually shown by women to men: meaning ‘Hah! small penis!”.

Loose pumping fist : shown by both men & women to men: meaning:

‘wanker’ :meaning  “you’re too-ugly to get a girl, and too crap in bed to keep her there”

 

Sexual failure is used as a metaphor when showing contempt for many other kinds of failure; artistic, sporting, social, political.

 

SOME CONTEMPTUOUS WORDS

 

1a: On Lady Montague : Alexander Pope

 

“From furious Sappho scarce a milder fate,

Pox'd by her love, or libell'd by her hate”

As a teenager, I was struck by a forgotten critic’s judgement that these were “the two most vicious lines in English literature”.  As Pope was a jilted suitor, they are also the sourest grapes ever. She was bold and talented enough to reply in kind.

 

 

1b: On Alexander Pope : Lady Montague

 

“But as thou hat'st, be hated by Mankind,

And with the Emblem of thy crooked Mind,

Mark'd on thy back, like Cain, by God's own Hand;

Wander like him accursed through the Land.”

 

 

2:  On Cabinet Colleagues : John Major

 

"I could bring in other people. But where do you think most of this poison is coming from? From the dispossessed and the never-possessed. You can think of ex-ministers who are going around causing all sorts of trouble. We don't want another three more of the bastards out there.” [25 July 93 : The Observer]

 

This quote was hardly in the class of Mark Anthony’s satirical almost contemptuous use of the word ‘honourable’ for Caesar’s murderers.  It is valuable because it was a man universally mocked for grey meekness turning red. A decade later we would realise that he himself deserved greater contempt for his rank hypocrisy in committing adultery while orchestrating a sanctimonious ‘Back to Basics & Christian Values’ campaign.

 

3:  On her First-born : Tess : Hardy

 

“When the infant had taken its fill the young mother sat it upright in her lap, and looking into the far distance dandled it with a gloomy indifference that was almost dislike ; then all of a sudden she fell to violently kissing it some dozens of times, as if she could never leave off, the child crying at the vehemence of an onset which strangely combined passionateness with contempt.”  [Ch.2]

This is a beautifully accurate description of the tragedy of absolute ambivalence: consider the sequence of words -  ‘dandle’, ‘gloomy indifference’, ‘dislike’, ‘violent kissing’ and ‘contempt’. That final word still seems shocking in connection with a mere infant. Readers will know that within hours the poor mite’s health collapses, the fatal final breath preceded by Tess’s vicarious baptism. She chooses the name Sorrow. Of course this is not a contemptuous name, but nor is it praise of anyone.

 

Not many years earlier, Esther, another fictional girl (though no doubt a common actual type of illegitimacy ) was told :

“You are your mother’s shame: as she is yours” [Bleak House : Dickens]

 

A century later, a real draper’s buyer from South Shields called Anne, deranged by postpartum psychosis, named her second child Dianne. We cannot see this name now without thinking of that oxymoron ‘People’s Princess’! But her secret meaning she revealed only decades later – Die-Anne!  Such profound ambivalences are cross-cultural: I once saw a talented young Thai who lived with the doom of being called Shame.

 

 

4: On Certain Sinners  : Dante’s Inferno

 

 

 

5: On Mick McCarthy, his National Team manager : Roy Keane

 

“ ‘[I said to him] Mick, you're a liar... you're a fucking wanker. I didn't rate you as a player, I don't rate you as a manager, and I don't rate you as a person. You're a fucking wanker and you can stick your World Cup up your arse. I've got no respect for you…

I hope I don't come across as bitter and twisted but that man can rot in hell for all I care. I don't feel any guilt about saying that at all because he deserves it. He deserves it. Fuck him. Fucking tosser.'   

 

Keane does not socialise with his fellow players, and his insistence on privacy is such that none of his team mates has ever set foot in his house. [McCarthy has.]”

[1/9/02 : The Observer ]

 

It was when I reread the whole article that I was struck by the repetition of the story that McCarthy had been invited to his house. It seems that for Keane this contributed to his sense of betrayal and his contempt. I understood, in a way McCarthy apparently did not, that such an invitation was the highest praise Keane offered: - ‘worthy to be invited home’. Not for him open-house at Beckingham Palace. Keane felt the Ireland manger had betrayed that trust, scorned his praise, and so soon followed Keane’s utter contempt. Comedians felt sorry for his dog, dragged round in public by Mr Angry.

 

 

 

6: On his lover : Mr Pavel W

“I can’t believe she is doing this.”  Pavel had just bumped into Kev after a couple of years. “We were in love. I pleaded - Have the baby, we’ll marry. But she said she didn’t want the baby. I couldn’t believe it. My baby, she’s going to…I’d have done anything for her. I’d have given my life. But not now! She can …she can fuck off. I’d give my life for you. I really would, if it came to it, I would give my life for you, right now! But not her, the bitch!  Pavel was distraught. Kev felt flushed by the unusual praise. A minute or so later, they parted.

 

As a 12 year-old kid, I’d kicked around the streets and fields with some kids in the neighbourhood. Pavel was a couple of years older, which makes all the difference at that age. So he was around with the local loafers for only a few months. Though he lived just a hundred yards away, some years went by without any sighting. Then when I was 17 and he 19 the chance encounter above happened near my house. Pavel had the aura of someone who’d been away to college. So I was astonished at this story arriving so quickly in the catch-up chat and even more so at his fragmenting tone. I was quickly out of my depth. We didn’t know each other well, hadn’t even been in each other’s house. We both over-valued that brief street-play memory. I think I was completely distracted by his strange offer to die for me. Mortal vanity can’t resist praise. I’d had praise at home and school (but not the street), but this was a new level. ‘Aren’t I special, set in goodness, life-worthy’,  I thought without irony. In fact I was so distracted I could not remember how the conversation ended: only that it was quite soon. I never saw him again – ever!

 

I am glad to be able to say I told the story only a couple of times and then forgot it. But I regret to say that I was so dumb, that it would be several years before I worked out the truth that Pavel’s high-praise, the complimentary offer to die for me, was only a way of showing contempt for her. He really didn’t know me well enough for his gesture to have such grace and truth.

 

 

 

7: On His Wife : Film Husband : Godard  Le Mepris: Contempt

It is very rare for the word ‘contempt’ to be in a film title.

[Though probably not as rare as ‘trade union’ in an American film!”]

 

A Writer has a beautiful Wife: they are in love. But he never gets enough patronage or work to be comfortable moving among the 60’s jet set. The potential Patron doesn’t have a wife, but he has enough money and power to bed beautiful women on the make. Mostly this is enough. He doesn’t care they occasionally despise him (and themselves). There is for him the additional pleasure of humiliating talented men who do occasionally get the rarer beauty. The moral problem for the Artist comes down to who must be humiliated to secure work when the Patron finally makes the move: ‘Your talent deserves my patronage. I am willing to give it. You have a very lovely Wife.’ [This film was long before Indecent Proposal ]

The Artist pimps his Wife. His Wife accepts the pimping to help the Man she loves. Alas, some irreversible change has happened. The writing project is good but dull. The Artist and his Wife now have money and more work to come. But he despises himself for pimping his wife. He comes to despise her, this being easier for his psyche. His Wife is broken too.

 

 

 

8: On her neighbour, Gulch : Aunt Em : Wizard of Oz.

 

“Almira Gulch, just because you own half the county doesn't mean you have the power to run the rest of us! For twenty-three years, I've been dying to tell you what I thought of you!  And now -- well, being a Christian woman, I can't say it!”

This is so poignant because it locates an ancient desire, to show rage and contempt, which is once again suffocated. It would be nice to think that the coming whirlwind is Aunt Em finally letting go of her dark breath.

 

 

 

9: On Gandhi : Narayan

 

“It costs me 2000 rupees a day to keep Bapu [Gandhi] living in poverty”.

Narayan was a billionaire supporter of Gandhi and the Congress Party, so this comment is hardly contemptuous. And yet, it wittily discloses ambivalence. One of the hardest things to keep in mind when listening to the emotional rhetoric of politicians, is - Who paid the party (your) funds, and how did they earn those funds? The current cash-for-honours scandal shows what a sewer there has always been underneath Parliament.

Ved Mehta revealed a different physical economy in his stories of the young women Gandhi took into his bed to test/prove his celibacy, and to keep him warm.

 

One might extrapolate and say “It costs his family and disciples a lot of suppressed anger and lively life to keep Gandhi in non-violence & no-contempt mode.”  His son almost vindictively became a Muslim and then a drunk.

 

These stories involve an absolute failure to contain one’s own anger & sexuality being dealt with by the defensive strategies of projection and coercion. More on this below. There is an old Spanish proverb - Take what you want – but pay for it. To which one might truthfully add: “If you don’t pay, someone else will have to”

 

 

10: On the Fig Tree & the Hypocrites : Jesus.

 

“Now in the morning as he returned into the city, he hungered. And when he saw a fig tree in the way, he came to it, and found nothing thereon, but leaves only, and said unto it, Let no fruit grow on thee henceforward for ever. And presently the fig tree withered away.

And in the morning, as they passed by, they saw the fig tree dried up from the roots. And Peter calling to remembrance saith unto him, “Master, behold, the fig tree which thou cursedst is withered away.”  [Matthew 21:18-20 & Mark]

 

As Freud reminded us one of the necessary albeit unhappy tasks of maturation is relinquishing the god-like Pleasure Principle of infancy – what I want, I get immediately - and by mastering instinctual impatience, attain Reality Checkpoint. This is a lovely and rather funny example of the divine Christ being vexed by mortal limitation. What Sunday School lesson can there be possibly be in this? The expression of emotion towards objects, rather than people who can & must engage with them,  is a rich comedic theme eg Basil Fawlty birching his rubbishy car. It is stretching the point to say Christ feels contempt for the fig tree. The dark emotion is clearer below.

“Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are as graves which appear not, and the men that walk over them are not aware of them.” [Luke 11]

 

This piece of withering contempt joined Elizabethan misogyny to produce their commonly used image of women (bodies/faces) as whited sepulchers.

 

11: On Teaching adverts on TV: Kalu

 

I thought I would allow myself one expression of absolute contempt. Though I am a trained teacher, I chose not to teach: but I still remain beholden to my good teachers.

 

In the past few years there have been ads on the telly and in the papers trying to charm citizens into teaching. They surely cost tens if not hundreds of thousands of pounds. My point is that we all pass through school/college for 11-18 years, being in the company of teachers sometimes for longer than one is with one’s parents. On the basis of some good experiences there, one might decide to teach when one is grown up, to pass on learning. Certain professions do not need information, except where the State has so sullied the reputation and pleasures of that profession that rescue is necessary. But even if teaching needs rescuing it doesn’t need adverts. I despise the State and the ministers of State and the media agency who makes these wretched films.

 

 

Chapter 7 : EXPLAINING HESITATION

 

Contempt is more than anger. Some might say, after Yeats, that it is the intellectual form of hatred : as “perversion is the sexual form of hatred.”

 

In the film Bringing up Baby the tiger is used a metaphor for barely controllable energy: viz Katherine Hepburn’s sexuality. Think of the common self-description: “I was beside myself with anger” : a curious image of splitting into two selves: one formed of rage.

 

ASYMMETRY

 

We must proceed by observation, noting what people do, and then offer explanation. The word ‘explanation’ is neutral: whereas the word ‘criticism’ though commonly used in a neutral inflection – even meaning ‘educative judgement’ - is usually felt as a negative/negating attack. Using this ordinary meaning of criticism we can make the observation:

(a) Most people criticise other people more often than they praise them.

 

I’d conjecture that most Readers would want to take issue with this generalisation. It paints a depressing and distressing, if not Hobbesian, picture of ordinary life. They might want to reply:

 

(b) Most people are polite – saying ‘please’, ‘thank-you’ ‘sorry’ & ‘well-done’– most of the time.

 

I don’t dispute that counter-observation. These words are often spoken and often heard. But just think for a moment – If the tone & affect of goodwill which should accompany any use of these phrases in order to make them true courtesy, was truly present each time they were used, in group-life at home, school, work, play, church etc  then ordinary life would feel very different: both children and adults would feel respected, encouraged, and hopeful. Do they hell! Well do they – look at the streets! My point is that the words are mostly used without that affect, so in fact what sounds like apology or praise are nonesuch; they are just a paler form of attack. Here is a first asymmetry.

(c) What sounds like criticism is (nearly) always criticism: but what sounds like praise often isn’t.

 

We can add that:

(d) People show less contempt than they feel, and less often.

 

If we accept (a) and (d) to be true - and at the least they show that praise and contempt are not neutral - what is the explanation for the asymmetry? Let us look at an analogous asymmetry.

 

e) People use the Enjoyment Statement & Question far less than the Distress Statement & Question.

 

To state the obvious:

 

i) Enjoyment Statement

‘I enjoyed doing X yesterday’, ‘I’m enjoying doing Y today’

 

ii) Enjoyment Question

“What have you enjoyed doing recently/” and/or  “Are you enjoying yourself now?.”

 

iii) Distress Statement

“I am in pain now!” “I was in pain yesterday”

 

iv) Distress Question 

“Are you alright (or in difficulties)?” “How’s your health been?”

 

As with the remarks about courtesy above, it is not a matter of simply saying these few words, or tossing them off in the hearing of third parties, every so often. They have to be spoken with the appropriate affect of goodwill, interest and concern : and with a commitment to attend to the answer with goodwill. In some instances the only truly human response to the Distress Statement is “How can I help?” : and to the Enjoyment Statement is “Let’s celebrate!”. Anything other than these is merely a variety of envy and spite.

 

BEGINNING EXPLANATION

 

One of the tragedies of life is how much intellectual energy, thought and emotion, people spend on poor or evasive explanations in lounges, bars, tv, parliament, church etc. This is partly out of stupidity but more often out of selfish deceit. No honourable adult would ever produce ‘economic miracle’ as an explanation for the state of an economy. Surely such explanations must always, every single occasion, include the fundamental quests and questions: “Follow the money? Who benefits and based on whose suffering?”

 

In the present realm of discussion about asymmetry the direction of explanation is given by two quests and questions:

“Follow the desire, and the anxiety released by it.”

 

Humans are most-often, but not always, pleasure-seeking – or at least

relief-seeking – beings. Reality teaches us the pursuit of pleasure is fraught with obstacles – external and internal. The internal obstacle is the anxiety comes from the awareness of not-being omnipotent or even potent enough to conquer those who seek to block one’s access to pleasures.

 

So the question is what anxiety is present in the four moves above: Enjoyment Statement & Question and Distress Statement & Question.

 

How to explain these five failures:

 

i  ) to offer praise to others

ii)  to accept praise from others

iii) to show contempt to others

iv) to receive & process contempt from others

v)  to arrive at a valid explanation for the above failures.

 

Freudian explanations begin from the fundamental experiences of anxiety, and the strategies of defence to ameliorate anxiety: negation (disavowal) and separation.

 

Failure to Offer Praise

 Envy

 

Failure to accept Praise

Wrath

 

Failure to Show Contempt

Cowardice

 

Failure to Receive & Process Contempt

Pride

 

Failure / Hesitation to arrive at explanation

Magical thinking

 

Again let me begin with a point gettable by a six-year-old kid. By then kids will have been introduced to, learned the idea of opposite. 

They may then be asked: What is the opposite of sink?

 

All except geniuses will reply float. The true opposite is rise.

 

Float is only a contrary

Rise is both a contrary and an opposite.

 

Like and Dislike are opposites to each other : Indifferent is a contrary to both. All concepts have a portion of affect/feeling attached to their understanding and to their use. In some social contexts the volume of affect is intensified, in itself, and by the affect of anxiety, and might even become unbearable.

 

As we grow up we get caught by the following emotional traps:

Do you like the blue dress or the red dress?

I like the red?

So what’s wrong the blue?!

 

If you answer I don’t care about either.

Bastard! will be the reply.

 

She is very clever?

So you think I’m stupid. Bastard!

 

Full of the briars of fallacy is daily conversation. This leaves some people paralysed about making judgements.

 

The hesitation to show contempt might have three causes:

 

1) A conscious belief that - a display of contempt will certainly lead to verbal & emotional counter-attack, and possibly physical attack – which will be unmanageable. This leads to conscious anxiety and that leads to inertia, even intentional pre-emptive over-praising!

 

2) An unconscious inability to accept the presence of a feeling of contempt and of a desire to show it.

 

3) An unconscious inability to accept that the energy required to show praise and the energy to show contempt have a common source. This manifests as either a conscious belief that there is no common source – a sort of intellectual disavowal: or as conscious belief that the puzzle is too complex: a magical unknowability. 

 

Anxiety generates the following basic defences:

Intellectual disavowal – separation

Emotional disavowal – negation

Unconscious Logic (enter Matte Blanco!)

 

 

ANOTHER CHILDREN’S FALLACY

 

At 10 years old, I find in our cellar a copy of War & Peace. I am astonished at the big-fatness of the book, and awed by the tiny writing on thin-paper and by there being no pictures. I reason as follows:

Oh that’s what grown-ups read.

So when I am grown up, I will read that.

 

Around the same time I had a similar experience, in the library, with a book of Dante’s: amazed at the tiny writing done in strange spacing, [the poetry] and the even tinier writing elsewhere [the notes]

 

In fact I did read both – just after the transitional moment of degree finals. No doubt I had accumulated from adult actions many conjectures about what actions make an adult. I surely omitted most of them. Recently I realised that I did keep these two because somehow I had taken strength from a

semi-fallacious piece of reasoning.

 

From

If I read that, then I will be grown up

To

If I don’t read that, then I won’t be grown up. Or

I will not be [properly] grown-up till I do.

 

I say fallacious because I have committed the fallacy of denying the antecedent. The ‘semi’ aspect comes from a perhaps tendentious belief (shared by Dante) that one isn’t quite grown-up until one has engaged deeply with a range of ideas like this.

 

 

STRANGE MOVES

I think most people realise, now & then, that to praise is an absolute virtue & delight : and that they sometimes they feel strangely happy & free as well as good when they praise someone else. Another strangeness is that some people seem to draw praise, almost separate from displays of skill or virtue or beauty. Sometimes I feel this in another person’s praise of me: but I reason we are both in a better world for it.

 

 

Chapter 8: MISJUDGING THE JUDGEMENTAL : Dante As the Perfect Judge

 

 

Dante takes as an axiom of faith, that piety trumps pity.(Inferno :Canto XX). One’s obligation to accept Mother Church’s judgements with humility and belief viz piety, commit one to withholding or effacing certain impulses of ‘emotionalist’ pity: and in fact to convert such impulses into contempt. The secular position is the opposite – that pity trumps piety. Of course this founders on limiting cases like Hindley, Brady, Huntley and of course Hitler.

One is instantly open to charges of quasi-divine vanity if one declares pity for Hitler. Such kind-hearted people not only can’t imagine the depth of human depravity and duplicity and the hellish brutal narcissism of other humans and that this might lead them to misrecognise contrition : but they also can’t see that sometimes ordinary gestures are irrelevant.

 

The Sex Pistols, merely to shock everyone, - Ooohh How daring! -  sang

God Bless Myra Hindley

God Bless Ian Brady

 

But Germaine Greer wrote an article “Will no one show mercy to Myra?”

This implied that she was most merciful: and failed to understand that Hindley still hadn’t arrived at true, rather than merely manipulative, contrition. Gitta Sereny similarly failed to see through Speer’s manipulative persona.

 

Contrary to flip, unlearned, even unread, judgements that Dante was simply a spiteful judgemental bastard – just look at the Inferno – one can as simply point to Purgatorio & Paradiso and ask what other work in world literature contains so much praise. And as closer readers of Inferno know, even that contains one of the greatest passages of praise to a teacher.

 

I would give examples here.

 

 

Chapter 9 : SOME NEW EXAMPLES OF PRAISE

Vox-Pop : Posh & Demotic

 

 

 

Chapter 10 : CONCLUSION  &  FINAL TIPS on HOW TO PRAISE

 

USUAL SMALL PLEA
People always balk at other people’s taxonomies and lists and spectrums. Reader, please don’t just say :

“Your spectrum/list is too neat and constraining. It has too much that is wrong and too much that is missing There’s far more to say”

 

Instead, please give examples, showing how I’m wrong, and what like-intensities I’ve missed out.

 

In the film Gregory’s Girl, his little girl-pal – not the eponymous girl  - wonders why boys are so interested in numbers. I thought of this when I recently read the following:

“I will arrange under five heads (on all occasions I love to class and methodize) every possible species of objection, and subjoin all the reasonings which have occurred to me on the subjects.”

It is one of Godwin’s Women, Mary Hays: a letter from her 1797 autobiographical novel Emma Courteny. So is searching for taxonomy a mark of right-on-bloke feminist intellectualising  or my regression to the 18C speciousness. More important than praise!

 

 

HOW TO PRAISE

One way to set the context is to reflect on the phrase Manners Maketh Man : for the ability to show proper praise does seem to be part of manners.  One either heard this phrase at primary school – posh-school or slum-school (like mine) or one didn’t. One of the last public quotations of the phrase is in Sting’s song in honour of Quentin Crisp: An Englishmen in New York : a literal gay lord under threat from low thugs still ‘walks and never runs’.  

 

But one must also keep in mind that even perfect manners may or may not be accompanied by the (moral) goodwill implied, because humans beings are capable of opportunistic acting.

 

Among the mighty permissions that Berne proposed are necessary for a sense of a fulfilled and hopeful life is the permission to do things well. When it is a truly benign permission, and not a manipulative charade or double-bind, then it includes not only doing & enjoying doing things competently but also creatively, the display of both skill and daring. This exercise of one’s faculties is enjoyable.

 

So if to one’s Enjoyment Question “What have you enjoyed doing recently?” the other person answers with the Enjoyment Statement “I enjoyed doing X well” , then, one is good-mannered only if one’s response to their expression of enjoyment has four components:

 

a) Well done!  X takes considerable skill.

b) I’m happy for you. You deserve success.

c) I’m happy with you. It’s cheered me up.

d) Let’s celebrate. Let’s share your skill and joy.

 

Saying all eight sentences sounds too formal and false. It is possible to use one two-word sentence to stand for all eight sentences: “Let’s celebrate” said in the right tone of voice could carry the meanings and emotions of all the other words.

 

Sometimes the praisee wants criteria/details from the praiser: mere praise is not enough – “Well done, that’s great”  does not feel satisfying enough. The American satirist Lenny Bruce beautifully captured the crucial point in a tiny sketch:

 

A young boy shows his mother a painting.

“It’s lovely.” she says.

So she is surprised when he says “Do you like it? “.

“Yes, I like it”.

“What do you like about it?” Clearly he is after something beyond her.

“I like it very much” she says with a hint of exasperation.

“But what do you like about it?” he persists.

“I like it that you stay in when you’re painting!”

 

Now both are unhappy. The mother is honest, but it doesn’t help him.  What he wanted was her attention and her recognition of his development.  Perhaps it was only with this painting that he had a sense of doing something well, or better, a sense of growing control, of the worth of the process as separable and often of more worth than the result. He wanted to know if his mother knew exactly what he was doing, if it interested her and gave her pleasure. eg: “That’s lovely how you’ve painted our dog. His fur and ears look just like that when he is running. Last year, all your cats and dogs looked the same, but you’ve got their faces right now. Great!”

 

That is why some musicians, and sportspersons, feel more respect for and pleasure in how a practitioner practices or doodles/jams than for sometimes too-showy performances. The 93 year-old Dantean Barbara Reynolds longed for argument/debate on her feltro interpretations.

 

We all long to be in a community of creators, in whatever realm of human activity. We long so deeply to say and to hear such remarks as:

“That’s good.”

“Thanks , I wondered about my taking those two elements. I’m glad that you think so.”

“It’s not great. It is not original, but you know that. But it’s good in that idiom.”

“I think you’ve made a new mould”

 

 

The logic of emotions tells us that many or even most people will not describe what they have done well until they have been asked, often repeatedly asked until they believe the request was real. The best way to ask is in the form of the Enjoyment Question. The moral puzzle for the praiser is;

 

1) Do I truly want to ask the Enjoyment Question?

 

2) If I see that the other person has done something praiseworthy, will I happily offer genuine praise.

 

                 

 

 

IF, & ONLY IF, YOU ARE OF A CERTAIN COLOUR,

IN THE NON-WHITE RANGE,

even more than being of a certain age, born 1940-1960,

then, even now, in 2023, you will know how much Pele means to you.

For most of my school-years in Nottingham, England,

I was the only non-white boy in an ocean of pale faces,

most of whom were kind, but all still-dyed in imperial condescension.

And yet, when it came to football,

there was the absolute integrity, prompting some humanity,

in their avowal that Pele, a blacker man than me,

was the greatest footballer alive:

whom they would love to meet and play with,

and carry on their white shoulders.

It is hard to exaggerate how much this cognitive dissonance meant to me.

In genuine affection, in the school playground,

they once called me Pele,

just before I skyed the sitter!

 

******************************************************

NOW, IMAGINE

being Xavi

and hearing Pele say:

 

I reaffirm - I love Xavi.

He is excellent.

I mainly like Barca because of Xavi and also [Andres] Iniesta and [Lionel] Messi.

That team reminds me of my time with Santos playing with Zito, Coutinho and Pepe.

A lot of Spain's game is like Barcelona's. Barcelona is the team of Spain.

In fact, there should be about eight Barcelona players in the team.

 

and to recall saying this