Making My Podcast: Season 1, Episode 3: Empathy, pt. 1: The Elusive Nature of Integrity
Here is the full transcript for Season 1, Episode 3 of my podcast, Manly: Reframing Masculinity:
Welcome back to Manly: A Podcast About Reframing Masculinity. I am the grateful creator and host of this podcast and today, I am going to share some of my thoughts on Empathy and Integrity:
Manly: Reframing Masculinity — Season 1, Episode 3: Empathy, pt. 1: The Elusive Nature of Integrity
We hear the phrase “falling from grace” fairly frequently these days. There was time in our cultural history when someone “falling from grace” felt like a big deal. These days, due to the helpful and powerful #MeToo and #TimesUp movements, we can see that “falling from grace” has, in some ways, lost its power. Men, mostly straight, cisgender, white, middle-aged males, are frequently finding themselves losing power and falling from grace in the public eye.
These men tend to be clergy and spiritual leaders or politicians. When they make glaring errors, almost always of a sexual or financial nature, we say they have “fallen from grace.” There was a time when this felt shocking and surprising! Why? Because it was less frequently brought to our attention. I don’t believe that it happens more now than it has in the past. I think our attention, relationship, and access to all variety of media has grown, rapidly. We now see and absorb more than we ever have. This includes scandalous information about leaders in our culture violating their integrity and “falling from grace.”
Let’s look at that word “scandalous” for a minute. The English word scandal finds its roots in the Koine Greek word “skandalon,” which means “snare or stumbling block.” The word would pass through Latin and French before winding up as the Middle English word “scandal,” which means, interestingly enough, “discredit to religion.” The word religion, from the Latin word “religionem” means to be bound to something. So, a scandal is just something that blocks connection and creates disconnection with whatever we have bound ourselves. It is, literally, the opposite of integrity. More about this later.
When someone, like Kevin Spacey, Harvey Weinstein, or Louis C.K., falls from grace in the public eye, we tend to respond with shock and surprise. Why? We say shit like, “Folks, this kind of thing isn’t normal!” Thus, we are admitting, it should surprise us when someone in leadership and power screws up and hurts someone else. We tend to reserve these moments of shock for wrongs of a sexual and financial nature, but rarely for other issues.
This has started to deeply impact our understanding of and connection to empathy. Tom Junod, the journalist who was good friends with the late Fred Rogers says that if Mr. Rogers were alive today, he would respond to President Trump and the violent, mass shooters and racist Proud Boys who marched on Charlottesville the way he responded to everyone. He would respond with empathy. He would make the statement to the President, to the shooters, to the Proud Boys, and to all of us, “You were all children once, too.” Mr. Rogers wanted all people to see that they are beloved children of God and they need to receive opportunities to care for their hurting, scared, and hiding inner child.
The Mr. Rogers’, and Mother Teresa’s, and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, and Dorothy Day’s stand out to us so much because they were engaged empaths who took compassion and integrity seriously. Mr. Rogers and Mother Teresa appeared like fully integrated people. Their values and actions matched up and worked together. These people stick out to us and become our heroes and saints. Why, though? We admit surprise and reverent awe when someone acts like Fred Rogers or Rev. Dr. King, but, this does not work, given our current cultural response to leaders who lack integrity.
How can it be that we find both a lack of integrity and a lot of integrity surprising and even shocking in our leaders at the same time? This does not work, folks. One cannot be more surprising than the other! I think what this proves is, we have lost touch with our own sense of integrity and so we are depending on our public leaders to practice it so we can hold SOMEONE to a higher standard. This is what we like to do. We make scapegoats. We put people on pedestals and then DEMAND that they live up to our shitty expectations of them. We become devout moralists who struggle with our own integrity but expect our human leaders not to.
Maybe you are listening to this and thinking, well, what the fuck, Josiah? I don’t struggle with integrity! I try my best to be a decent, helpful person.
Ok, sure. Maybe you volunteer at the local homeless shelter and work as a social worker, or some shit. Maybe you walk old ladies across the street in your spare time. Good for you! Is your shirt from Wal-Mart or Target? Are you driving a car that uses gasoline and oil? Do you ever stop at McDonald’s for a burger or chicken nuggets? Are you using an Apple product?
If the answer to any of these questions is “yes,” no matter your values, then you are also struggling to fully spiritually and morally integrate. The clothing sold by places like Wal-Mart and Target and Nike and Banana Republic was made by oppressed slave children. The car you are driving is killing our fucking planet. The fast food beef or chicken you consume came from a factory farm and is also killing our planet and torturing innocent animals. The entire Apple empire was built on the backs of slaves. Oh, so was Disney. Enjoying Star Wars lately?
I could go on. But I won’t. Why? I may have issues and I may be fucked up, too, but I can say that I am willing to admit that I struggle, deeply, with integrity. What if we could all admit that we all struggle? If we did, we would find it 1. easier to empathize with individuals who publicly fall from grace and 2. to help those in need. We would be better people! Mr. Rogers and Mother Teresa did not think they were somehow better or morally perfect! They saw themselves and others just as they were and are, broken and beautiful. Flawed and worthy of love.
In my world, real men are expected to have integrity. But, what the fuck does that even mean? I don’t know! By whose standard of integrity are we choosing to live? A particular religion or spiritual tradition? A particular text? A political party? A specific TV news station or podcast? People in my home community used to say, “I don’t live by man’s standards but by God’s standards.” Well, ok, but which God are you talking about? The God revealed in Jesus Christ who commissions us to love and serve the poor and dismiss the wealthy OR the God revealed in the violence of war as He commands Joshua to slaughter innocent women and children to demonstrate His glory? So, don’t get me started on God’s standard, and who the fuck do we think we are, speaking for the Divine, anyway? Generally, when men say to me, “I’m living by God’s standard,” what they are actually saying is, “I am living by my standard of God’s standard,” which means, effectively, we have turned ourselves into God. Postmodern philosopher, Jacques Derrida, would have a field day with this. What did he say? “There’s nothing outside of the text” aka everything we say, think, feel, do, and experience is done so through an interpretive lens.
Is this the problem, then? Are we just making Gods of ourselves in order to determine who is in and who is out? What makes a man? Why is Obama not presenting his birth certificate more scandalous to some than President Trump publicly mocking differently abled individuals? I am left to wonder.
And what of my own biases? I would gladly welcome my friend who is gay, poor, middle-aged, alcoholic, and autistic to dine with me, even though he has done and said some hurtful, racist things before I would ever invite the current president to my table. I own this bias in me and I don’t like it. I want to live into my empathy more profoundly and deeply, but, perhaps I need more integrity to do that? Or, is it that I need more empathy to to have more integrity?
I’m not certain. All I know is, we have missed the boat in our culture. We don’t have integrity nailed down and we are not the gatekeepers or the arbiters of truth. We are humans. That’s all. What if we just allowed ourselves to be humans? Would that change things? I don’t know. Let’s take a risk and find out…
