A fellow blogger tweaked me in email about my aggressively self-deprecatory mention of my upcoming interview with Frank. Quit doggin’ yourself, he said. I look forward to reading you, ’cuz you’re a right-on chick.
Okay, that is a slangy, somewhat sexist, and less eloquent version of what he really said. But I don’t feel comfortable outing him on this; my revision should make the authorship completely unfathomable, especially since he isn’t to my knowledge particularly sexist.
Another blogger asked me in email today not to retreat so quickly, partly because it’s hard to react properly to.
Clearly my class of rhetoric is not making a good impression. I think I may need to explain it, if not change it.
(Tell me about your childhood, says the guy with the thick Austrian accent.)
Until my late teens, I grew up in such social isolation that I still have a very deaf ear for social and interpersonal cues. (At least, I think that’s where I get it.) I mean, I am really deaf; I do not see things—aspects of other personalities, evidence of how other people are feeling or reacting—that are obvious to everyone else until my face gets rubbed in them. The detritus from my social deafness is threefold: I commit faux pas at the drop of a hat, I am substantially incapable of getting a good read on people, and finally, I often don’t understand when, how, or how badly I’ve messed up, when I mess up.
I was ungodly arrogant for a long time, too. I really was. I hate even thinking about it. People who weren’t book-smart, people who Mung forbid failed at something—well, they were just a different class of life, that was all there was to it. It wasn’t really that I thought them a lower class (though I had moments, and I’m ashamed of them); the arrogance lay in believing them somehow different in essentials from me.
I learned better, obviously. Long-time lectores will immediately know when and how. Others are welcome to find out.
So I find myself, two or three professional disasters (of which social ineptness looms large as a cause) later, not terribly enamored of my own capacities. Maybe I’ve overreacted. Maybe not. Either way—much of my self-deprecation is a defense against ever ever repeating the kind of arrogance, the belief in my personal infallibility, that I used to possess.
On a slightly less negative note, I also find that I prefer the stance of “fellow seeker after knowledge,” or even “court fool,” to any variation on “expert.” I possess expertise in certain areas. It isn’t encyclopedic expertise, and I gain nothing by pretending it is. Indeed, were I to adopt the stance of expert, and put value on that stance, I would risk being forced to pretend to expertise I don’t have, actually losing face when I don’t know something. I have seen people caught in that trap. (Academia is rife with them, but hardly has a monopoly on them.) It’s very sad, and when it leads to the crime of Daedalus, even frightening and destructive.
Medieval rhetoricians had a term for the written expression of my court-fool stance: captatio benevolentiae, the seeking of goodwill. Much medieval literature begins with a longish discussion of why it is no particular good to anyone, why the author is someone to be disregarded, why the reader is probably better off using the vellum for a grocery list. The idea is to disarm the reader’s suspicions and distrust, to bridge the gulf between writer and reader by erasing the extra status presumably conferred on the writer by having published a book.
I believe in bridging such gulfs. I believe in putting student and teacher on the same social level; if someone who respects me or admires what I know believes my status and my knowledge to be within her grasp, she will work all the harder to gain it. So I don’t play the expert, and I react badly to anything that threatens to put me on an expert’s pedestal. Possibly I go too far in the other direction. I prefer this excess to its opposite, however.
The last piece of the puzzle is my desperate fear of interpersonal conflict. I really get scared and upset when the fur starts flying; more so when I may be a mover of the conflict, because my social deafness prevents me from understanding the seriousness (or lack thereof) of the situation. I had a really bad evening tonight because I went and mixed myself up in the blogthread emanating from Burningbird’s post on anger. Not to rehash the whole thing (I’d just start crying, and nobody needs that), it turned out okay, but it was a classic example of what happens when I stomp my big stupid elephants’ feet onto sensitive ground.
So I run away when things start to look threatening. I dive into a little hole, and often I don’t come out again. To avoid having things become threatening in the first place, I engage in (over-)ingratiating and self-deprecatory behaviors. Don’t hurt me; I’m harmless. Not to mention pure social avoidance, e.g. disallowing blog comments.
So that’s why I do what I do the way I do it. Social deafness palliation, arrogance avoidance, conflict avoidance. It’s not courageous and it’s not pretty, and it seems to annoy the heck out of some people. But for now, it’s the way I can best function in worlds I don’t have the ideal equipment to fathom.
