I am so deeply divided in my own thinking between accepting that we’re in a cold civil war with people who are implacable enemies and thinking that position is morally and pragmatically wrong-headed. As per my essay of a few weeks ago, even if this is a cold civil war (and thus, as per the Cold War metaphor, one with actual shooting, violence and intimidation in it), it may at the least not be strategically smart to frame it as such.
This lengthy, compelling, carefully reported article in the Washington Post about a West Virginia family and its surrounding community riven to the core by the politics of vaccination (and, it turns out, other sociopolitical issues) really grabbed me in terms of my own internal divisions and indecisions.
In the article, a mother and daughter who live together in the same household are bitterly divided over vaccination. The young adult daughter and her partner are opposed to vaccination. The middle-aged mother and her husband are vaccinated, and the mother very much wants her daughter and partner to vaccinate as well. When they refuse, the mother demands that the daughter move out. But her husband doesn’t back her up, the daughter stays and the mother then moves out to live with another of her daughters nearby. That household also has some complicated intergenerational politics around vaccination, as do most of the families living a relatively tight-knit community around a small man-made lake near Charleston, Lake Chaweva.
The father dies not long afterwards. Not of covid, but of a massive heart attack precipitated in part by a long life of heavy drinking and smoking. The article holds out the question of whether mourning the dead will bring people back together. The answer, more or less, is “no”: a brother of the dead man suspects it is the vaccine that killed him, other anti-vaccination conspiracy theorists in the community intensify their promotion, the daughter continues to refuse to vaccinate, and the grieving widow is left as determined as ever to live in a home where vaccination is a basic commitment, all while the family home itself is poignantly physically falling apart because of a shifting hillside nearby.
I thought to myself as I neared the end, “If this were an anthropological study of a community in southern Africa, I wouldn’t have any difficulty suspending my judgmental feelings. I’d just try to understand all the actors in their own terms, understand the deeper historical roots of their thinking, respect all of the ideas and beliefs being articulated. I’d be able to be curious and at least partially detached—I wouldn’t see it as my business to object, challenge or oppose what I was reading.” That wouldn’t be because of some instinctive ethical balance, mind you: it is professional training that requires constant mindfulness and reinforcement. Like a doctor trying not to be judgmental about a patient. While interviewing people, I’ve definitely had moments where I thought, “This guy I’m talking to is an asshole”. But you table that feeling: it’s not appropriate to what you’re doing.
But that’s part of the problem with my thinking while reading the article, which is one of a great number of similar articles and books written over the past six years or so by journalists, scholars, commentators, etc. who are striving to make sense of America’s political culture in this fraught moment—the “media safari” into Trump Country. As soon as I say, “I should strive for that kind of suspension of judgment that I’m professionally obliged to have in other contexts,” I’m putting myself in a position where I’m not a peer or fellow citizen of the families living around Lake Chaweva, West Virginia. That’s an especially perverse thing for me to do in this case in that my paternal grandmother’s entire family on both sides of her family tree lived for more than a century prior to her birth within ten miles of Lake Chaweva and most of the descendants of both of her grandparents (my great-great grandparents) are still thereabouts. They may be strangers to me in multiple senses of that word, but I am in this with them and they with me, however hard that thought might be.
Not that I should be too detached even in my professional work. I’m very fond of an essay by the film scholar and film-maker Manthia Diawara that focuses on griots, the famous West African court historians/bards/performers, who are often venerated by Western audiences and respected by historical scholars. As they should be, in some sense, but Diawara points out impatiently that in the context of life in West Africa, many griots are opportunists who fawn on the powerful (something that’s explicitly part of some of the most famous oral traditions) and are deeply conservative figures in cultural terms who scold and try to control young people. Diawara, in a somewhat bemused way, is observing that when you’re uncritically celebratory of griots, you’re endorsing their hostility to some other group of people that you may not know anything about.
Suspending judgment for a while is an important methodological principle and a good ethical rule of thumb. Refusing judgment indefinitely is in its odd way a kind of contemptuous gesture that maintains a sort of hierarchical distance between knowledge producer and the subject of knowledge. Being an outsider for a while helps you to see some things that the people inside a bounded world can’t see clearly for themselves. It also blinds you, at least at first, to some truths that are so well-known to the people you’re considering that they rarely need to talk about them. You can’t maintain that stance forever. As you learn more, your own humanity is pulled into the orbit of people you’ve come to know. In my scholarly work, I’ve definitely come to the point where I know whose side I’m on and why, even if I try to retain some distance (and some consciousness that my life is somewhere else, and it’s not mine to decide how some things will sort themselves out).
Lake Chaweva is no different, even if I found myself near there for real trying to assert or explore my real lines of ancestral connection. It’s no sin to feel in the end (or throughout) that I know whose side I’m on, even if I also can think some new and more complicated thoughts about why some people I oppose or find infuriating are in the mindset that they are. I can understand—and in so doing, find the tools for some form of empathy or connection.
Image credit: "Ace Hotel and Restaurant. Located on Kanawha Blvd., 1/2 mile east of Charleston city limits on U.S. highways 60 & 21, 2801 Kanawha Blvd. east, Charleston 1, W. VA." by Boston Public Library is licensed under CC BY 2.0