Men (18 page)

Coupledom is a pact two people make to attempt to know one another and create a life together, but it's just as important to overlook things too. A certain amount of strategic myopia is required, or the marital enterprise would be in even worse shape than it is. Getting the balance right is tricky. Knowing someone too well can kill desire: boredom and irritation result. Knowing someone too little can lead to nasty surprises. It's one of the conundrums of modern coupledom, or call it a “challenge” if you prefer. How
do
you know who this person you're married to is “underneath”? And if you do learn everything there is to know, penetrate every secret crevice, how can you possibly continue?

It's a cliché to say that you never really know what goes on inside someone else's marriage, but the hard truth is that you never entirely know what's going on in your own: the most familiar spouse can betray you horribly, even when there's no other person in the wings. The forms of spousal betrayal I'm thinking of include the quotidian ones, which no one entirely eludes—getting fat, getting boring, getting old, and then dying, the biggest betrayal of all. Stepping out on someone is only the most dramatic instance of all the ways there are to be a disappointment to a mate, though it's the one around which every anxiety seems to cluster. But while we're at it, why not hurl a few condemnations at the less melodramatic betrayals too?

Look, I'm not saying I particularly want to be cheated on, though it's probably happened. If I sound cavalier about it, I suppose it's that I have a certain soft spot for restlessness and unruly desires, for wanting more as an ontological condition. Or for not knowing
what
the hell you want. I can understand the impulse to experiment with other emotional and sexual possibilities than domestic coupledom always delivers, though big messes certainly can ensue. But we live in complicated times and no one here's a saint. Probably no one much wants to live with one either.

 

Self-Deceivers

The philosophical literature on self-deception is not incredibly helpful if you're trying to learn how to avoid the condition. A recent examination of the topic begins with the following example: “A survey of university professors found that 94% thought they were better at their jobs than their average colleague.” Are university professors exceptionally adept at self-deception or is it an endemic condition, the author (a professor himself) wonders. Yes and yes, but what does that tell us? Maybe that the extent of your own self-deception is one of those dog-chasing-its-tail questions no one's capable of answering—how would you know that the answer you came up with wasn't just another instance of your talent for self-deception?

I came to be perusing this useless genre of pseudo-expertise because I was writing a book about scandal and why people keep blowing up their lives in such flamboyant ways on the national stage, acting out their weird psychodramas and tangled anti-social desires, generally leading to grisly forms of humiliation. Society gets vengeful when its norms are violated—a fact you'd think would require a rather skillful form of forgetting to ignore, since it's one of those basic truths of social existence. Still, despite the many disincentives there's no shortage of humans lining up to do it all the time, fueled, it seems, by this fateful capacity for self-deception.

As we know, many of those in line are male politicians who, despite their buttoned-up demeanors, keep getting exposed to the world in farcical sexual situations. Or it's our habit to treat these episodes as farce: the late-night comedians go to town, the pundits take a jesting tone. Even so, there's nothing so uproarious about being the butt of late-night comedy; it's more like the modern equivalent of a town square pillory. It's not being shunned the exposed politician has to fear, it's being turned into a hapless schlemiel and getting
laughed
out of town.

Take the former presidential candidate and one-time vice presidential nominee who turned out to have been stepping out on his much-revered cancer-stricken wife, even fathering a love child with the other woman before finally terminating his presidential campaign. This was John Edwards, who'd billed himself as the model family man, then betrayed his family in the arms of a New Age twit everyone agreed was far inferior to his wife, then lied when asked about it, then hedged, then split hairs about the timing of the affair, then said that his wife's cancer was in remission at the time (as if that mattered), and to cap it off accused himself of narcissism and egotism during his televised mea culpa. As an apology, this backfired.

Because it's difficult to make embarrassing things go away on the Internet, it's actually still possible to find a number of so-called webisodes from the Edwards campaign online, shot and produced by the woman Edwards finally admitted to having the affair with. You can even hear her on the sound track asking coy questions of Edwards and giggling at his answers. Though there's some ambiguity about when the affair started, what's not in dispute is that the affair-mate had no prior video production experience when Edwards put her on the campaign payroll. Pretty clearly they were sexually involved while she was shooting these videos of him; clearly he knew that what was being recorded would be posted on the Web for the world to see, and also knew—
at some level
—that if these facts became public, it would decimate his shot at being leader of the free world, which for a while didn't look entirely impossible.
1
So the stakes were, arguably, high.

For the student of self-deception, these webisodes are quite a trove of research material, especially the one on the subject of … “authenticity.” We track Edwards to various political rallies, we're with him relaxing on his campaign plane in a backstage, unbuttoned view of the man behind the glossy posters. So what should we make of it when Edwards says, to the camera:

I've come to the personal conclusion that I actually want the country to see who I am, who I really am. I don't know what the result of that will be. But for me personally, I'd rather be successful or unsuccessful based on who I really am, not based on some plastic Ken doll that you put up in front of audiences. That's not me, you know?

Even for those of us who don't care to sermonize about other people's sex lives, or who admired Edwards's position on the wealth gap, it's hard not to be mortified by such a flamboyant performance of self-contradiction on such a national scale. Political cynics will say that whenever a politician talks about authenticity he's sure to be lying, but here Edwards is also erecting the scaffolding for his own beheading, which is unsettling no matter how cynical you are. No doubt this accounts for the jokes. Levity at least forestalls having to look too closely at any similar propensities of one's own.

But there's another reason philosophers are interested in the question of self-deception. When we joke about the latest bimbo eruption, we're not just trading views on sexual morality, we're also having an implicit debate about how consciousness is structured. Where you come down on Edwards reveals what philosophers would call your philosophy of mind.

For instance: one of the more widespread explanations of Edwards's behavior was “hubris.” This was shorthand for the view that Edwards was lying, knew he was lying, knew that exposure of his lies would mean downfall, thought he could get away with it, and simply miscalculated. Those who hew to this story are taking the position that all mental activity is conscious, and all facets of the mind are transparent to itself. Self-deception per se doesn't exist for this camp; those who engage in what might
look
like self-deception are actually fully conscious of what they're doing—they're
deliberately
acting badly and they know it; they're just hoping not to get caught.

Opposing the hubris camp we have what might be called the “compartmentalization” camp. Compartmentalization proponents would say that Edwards wasn't
consciously
deceiving his audience. He both knew what he was doing, and didn't: the main person he was deceiving was himself. This camp would lean toward a more Freudian account of the psyche: there are forms of knowledge that are accessible to one part of the psyche and not to another. Two incompatible beliefs can coexist because humans are eternally and irrevocably split, making complete self-mastery an impossibility. To a compartmentalization theorist, a hubris-camp joke like “He couldn't keep it zipped” is itself an instance of compartmentalization, a symptom of the same forms of split consciousness it means to condemn. Fooling yourself about the supremacy of self-knowledge makes you a walking example of compartmentalization.

At this point our picture of how the mind is structured becomes necessarily more ornate, because if you're lying to yourself, who's the self doing the lying, and who's the self being lied to? And if we're so essentially split-uppable, such bifurcated beings, is this any way to live—not knowing at any moment whether one part of you is actively working to sabotage the other?

Watching Edwards proclaim, in that “authenticity” webisode, that he wants the country to know who
he really is,
I don't doubt that he meant every word of it. He wanted the country to see who he was, while at the same time knowing that he was a man with a career-destroying secret—after all, the secret was sitting across the aisle from him on the campaign plane, holding the camera that was recording those very words. Yet if two such opposing forms of knowledge can coexist autonomously in the same psyche, then none of us is in such great shape from a self-preservation standpoint. It's not that Edwards is a stupid guy. What he failed to grasp was his own capacity for self-deception. But let's face facts: aren't any of us capable of massive forms of self-betrayal every waking hour of the day?

*   *   *

Here's someone who would disagree. One of our most adamant anti-compartmentalizers was the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, whose explanation for what afflicted Edwards (were he still around) would probably have been “bad faith,” a condition to which he devotes a well-known chapter in his otherwise unreadable tome
Being and Nothingness.
Sartre vigorously rejected the whole premise of the Freudian unconscious: not only is it possible to consciously believe something in the face of evidence to the contrary, but in his terms, lying to yourself is
always
a conscious decision. The Edwards authenticity webisode would be doubly ironic for Sartre, since for him bad faith is the quintessential form of inauthenticity—you're appropriating a false notion of self, because you're knowingly participating in your own self-deception. You're refusing the radical possibilities of freedom he thinks are obtainable, and instead acquiescing to life in a social cage.

He offers up a series of charming little vignettes to illustrate the point. The most famous one involves a waiter in a café whose movements are just a little too precise, who “comes toward the patrons with a step a little too quick. He bends forward a little too eagerly; his voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the customer.” What's he up to? “He's playing at being a waiter in a café,” Sartre diagnoses. Why? Because this is what his customers want, so the waiter becomes alienated from himself, and imprisoned in his social role.

What's so charming is how closely observed and present this waiter seems—it's like you're there witnessing the scene yourself, as Sartre, a major café-goer, obviously was on many occasions. In addition to the waiter immortalized in his semi-comic impersonation of waiter, there's another much-cited example: the story of a young woman who consents to go out with “a particular man” for the first time and pretends not to notice his sexual advances. As Sartre explains, she actually knows quite well what the man's intentions are, but puts off deciding what to do about them, “concerning herself only with what's respectful and discreet in his attitude,” instead of admitting to herself what's really going on.

Sartre charges the young woman with bad faith. Why? Because she wants to see these compliments and attentions as about her
personality
, even though she knows it's not her personality that interests the guy. But for her to recognize “the desire cruel and naked would humiliate and horrify her.” Yet there's no reward for her in just being respected either, Sartre guesses. So she refuses to recognize the guy's lust for what it is, because in the end she doesn't actually know what she wants. Next comes a lengthy analysis of what ensues when the man pushes the situation further by holding the woman's hand, which calls for a decision: if she leaves her hand there she's saying yes to his advances, but if she pulls it away she breaks the charm of the moment. So she tries to postpone a decision as long as possible. “We know what happens next,” Sartre mocks. She leaves her hand in his, but she pretends not to
notice
what's happening to her hand and starts expounding about Life instead, in lofty, sentimental ways. Meanwhile her hand stays inert, “between the warm hands of her companion—neither consenting nor resisting—a thing.”

“We shall say that this woman is in bad faith,” reproaches Sartre.

But who
is
this “particular man”? Is
he
in good faith? This question we somehow never get around to. Given Sartre's reputation as one of the twentieth century's great chasers of women, known to discourse freely on his career as a seducer in the same suavely knowing tones of these vignettes, perhaps we can be forgiven for engaging in a bit of biographical fallacy. Critic Louis Menand writes of Sartre's legacy in these matters: “As one would expect of the great advocate of transparency, he discussed his reasons [for pursuing women] frankly”; these reasons, he frequently said, were primarily the pursuit of female beauty. (He saw it as a way of developing his aesthetic sensibility.) As Menand quotes Sartre: “First of all, there is the physical element. There are of course ugly women, but I prefer those who are pretty.… Then there is the fact that they're oppressed, so they seldom bore you with shop talk.… I enjoy being with a woman because I'm bored out of my mind when I have to converse in the realm of ideas.”