The Cost of Accusation
If you are not a good person, and you have not empathy, can you either apprehend or comprehend a good person's empathetic actions?
Yesterday, in the middle of a conversation on very much unrelated matters, a sometime friend (by which I mean someone who, mercurially, is either friendly or an accuser towards me) sprang this on me:
[My husband] watches what you eat when the men’s group meets, by the way. And so does [so-and-so]. They talk about it. I don’t think you have an egg allergy at all. Why do you say you do? It’s not true. Don’t you know people would notice your lying?
[Let’s ignore for now how the two men involved have never spoken to me about this but apparently gossip about it.] Now, to the vast majority of people who associate with me, I am known as someone with no food allergies, who is happy to eat whatever is served. To a few, I have confessed that I tend to get sick when I eat eggs [“Maybe I’m allergic? I dunno,” I say], generally only when the situation has forced me to explain myself (i.e. I have gotten incredibly sick in their presence and they ask me why). Call it a compromise: because technically, most any eggs I eat do make me sick. But—I eat about eight eggs a day: clearly, I am not allergic to eggs. So what gives? Are not all eggs created equal? (Indeed they are not.) And what is this friend talking about, accusing me of lying?
Well, I’m not allergic to eggs. But I am quite allergic (or sensitive, pick a word) to soy, which took a long time to deduce, given that this condition manifested in adulthood. Any egg you buy in a store is from chickens fed almost exclusively soy, meaning that my allergy goes off. Eating soy sets off a thermobaric migraine which, if allowed to fully materialize, resists any [OTC] painkiller under the sun, and which lasts upwards of 28hrs (i.e. however long it takes the inflammatory soy derivative to clear my bloodstream). Sometimes the pain deepens enough that my nervous system resorts to vomiting simply as a distraction.
Why don’t I tell people (save very specific friends, of whom the above is one) that I am allergic to soy? Well, the next time you’re buying groceries, look at the ingredients of anything—everything—you’re buying. You will see the words: CONTAINS: SOY on practically any prepackaged food in the United States. Fair enough, some might say. But Paul, they might then say, I didn’t make this food from a box mix—I made it from scratch. Why won’t you eat it?
Well, what eggs did you use? Eggs from a grocery store, right? Oh, and you used vegetable oil? You mean soybean oil cut with various other lubricants and solvents? The sandwich you just offered me for lunch: you know that that bread has soy in it, right? Read the ingredients. Vanishingly little store-bought bread does not have soy in it. The mayonnaise you used? Yup, it’s got soybean oil in it. How about the chicken breast? Yup, the muscle tissue of soy-fed chickens can develop sufficient concentration of soy that even chicken flesh can make me sick. Oh, you gave me some dark chocolate as a surprise gift? Read the ingredients: it’s got soy in it. Oh, your stir-fry has soy sauce in it? Guess I’ll decline the dinner you’ve made for your guests.
Can you imagine my telling people this? It is insanity. The fact that it’s all true doesn’t change that it’s also insanity. And so I simply don’t tell people. I do not want to be that person who requires all cooking and hospitality to revolve around him. In fact, I refuse to be. So, I eat whatever is served, and I wait, and if pain starts, then I gobble aspirin like candy, hoping to defuse the simmering explosion. If I’ve been drinking alcohol, too, then no aspirin: and, well, I pray to be saved. (Which I do anyway.) With those I’ve sufficiently close relationships, of course they generally accommodate my dietary idiosyncrasy, but they do so out of love for me, not out of any demand on my part. That is, of course, the point: that it is love freely given and freely received, not coerced kindness. For instance, when Penelope learned of my soy allergy, she very matter-of-factly remarked, “Well, I was thinking of getting rid of stuff like that anyway, so that’s that settled. I want you to be able to eat anything in our home when you come visit us.” And out went the soy.
The woman quoted above—let’s call her Jackie—knows that it is soy, not eggs. She knows that it is real: she has seen me sick. So why does she say what she says? For it is not a joke, I assure you.
Well, I don’t often presume to understand the psychology of women—but. Yes, there’s that word: but. In this case, I will take a stab at it. This is not a woman who is particularly empathetic. Indeed, I do not know that I have ever seen her exercise any empathy in particular—ever. And I have known her for over a decade. Were she asked this question in isolation, I frankly do not know how she would answer: “Is Paul a good person?” If I had to guess, though, I would lean towards her answer being in the negative. I said “She knows it is real,” but she has a complex theory that every physical hardship I face—up to and including much of The End—was/is pure fantasy on my part. That I imagine such things out of a warped hypochondria. Why does she think this? To take a stab at it,
The synthesis:
In the case of The End, she flatly disbelieves that much of what I say happened to me is physically possible. Her basis? Well, who knows. She has an English degree, and she enjoys listening to NPR. She lives in a very small world, spiritually and otherwise. I once put her into a fury by candidly remarking that St. Boniface really and truly existed, really and truly cut down a tree, and really and truly converted a town thereby to Christianity: “That’s just a story, Paul! Of course people wouldn’t die if they touched a tree: that’s not possible! None of that happened! Miracles don’t happen anymore!” So: for me to spend weeks beset upon by demons putting out my senses etc.? Beyond the pale of her world. I had to be imagining, and therefore lying, about The End. She has said as much to my face.
In her estimation of me, because she is not particularly empathetic, she thus cannot imagine the sensation of empathy, that I would live in empathy towards others—that I would empathetically wish to avoid placing the onus of allergy sensitivity upon anyone who wishes to love me by showing hospitality towards me.
In her estimation of me, it is also impossible that I might wish to avoid placing that onus upon others, because only a good person would do so, and I am not good, and so I couldn’t possibly be that considerate, thoughtful, or—dare I say it—sacrificial.
Therefore, the only logical choice left is that Paul is lying about his soy allergy—and because she is a good, virtuous, Christian woman, she is thus empowered to condemn sin in my life and tell me to repent of lying, with a side of persiflage and needling, just for kicks. She loves to assert that I am generally good-for-nothing, a multivariate failure, and then take valiant, heroic stances in larger social contexts, upbraiding me for comedic self-deprecation, attracting the affectionate murmurs of others: Ah, look how she cares so much as to wish him to not self-deprecate! When of course, deprecation is ordinarily her only mode towards me.
In doing all of this, she is paying a cost. No accusation is free. To accuse is as much to publicly suppose a person is one thing as it is to reveal that you yourself are something as well—something opposed to that thing which the accused supposedly is. In her case, the cost of accusation is her telling me that she believes I would lie about something which not only does not benefit me in any way, but actively, significantly, and continually inconveniences me both socially and financially (the eggs I buy from a farm—eggs that are soy-free—are $8/dozen). Put another way, the cost is her telling me that she has absolutely no idea why people lie.
She has tendered the charge that I am so desperate for special treatment—but only from my closest friends, whom, presumably, I would be most averse to inconveniencing—that I lie about something as oddly specific as an allergy to a hyper-common culinary ingredient. Cui bono? I could go on, but I suspect that I have made my point. The longer I might write about this, or similar costs of accusations, the more such things appear plainly only to condemn their authors, not their objects.
And what did she gain by saying these things to me? Absolutely nothing. She lost several things, but gained nothing. Perhaps she gained a swell in her ego, or whatever other vague, psychological vehicles or vessels others might pontificate upon: but truly, she betrayed how terribly she thinks of me and won absolutely nothing in the process.
Now, as she would well know, Shakespeare once wrote a play titled Measure for Measure. I think it apropos here. Am I proclaiming that you must never accuse others, because the cost is always too high? Nothing could be further from the truth. Rather, I am urging you towards careful contemplation as to just what it is of which you seek to accuse another. You shall be judged, measure for measure. Judge not, lest ye be judged: this is not a prohibition against judgment, but a warning against unfounded judgment.
Do I forgive her? Actually, I do. And I will probably forget the particulars of this event within a couple days. My short- and long-term memory formation, post-The End, are severely damaged. But I will not forget the costs she rendered. I will continue, as I have over the years, to trust her less and less and less. She has a barbed tongue and takes pleasure in injuring the hearts of others with it. That is a plain fact, and one which I relay with no amount of emotion or anger. It is simply true.
If you haven’t empathy, read great literature. It will teach you.
If you are not a good person—and no one is, save by the condescension of God alone—seek after God, plead for Christ to free you from the fetters of evil.
And if you cannot, at any given time, either apprehend or comprehend the actions of a person whom the majority of those around you hold up as, at bare minimum, a good person: weigh the costs. Consider just what it is you wish to accuse another of. Remember that the great enemy is called, quite plainly, the accuser. Is your accusation in alignment with Prime Reality? Or are you indulging in violence for the sake of violence? Are you, by accusing, only incarnating the spirit of the author of lies?
If Dostoyevsky is right—and he is—then should you continue on your foolish path, you shall only destroy yourself. Instead of destroying yourself, why not just shut up?
A final note on the two men involved in this episode, too. Without their gossip, none of this would even be possible to write about, because none of it would have happened. If you, as a married man, are happy to indulge in gossip about other men in your church, which you then merrily spread to your wife—a wife known to be acerbic and snide towards the object of your gossip—then you have done nothing but cause your wife to stumble. I don’t blame Jackie, particularly, for being a jerk. She has been that way towards me ever since the day I met her; clearly she likes being this way and is disinterested in changing. I do particularly blame her husband, however, for handing her ammunition, even if, as in this case, it was nothing but squibs.
Count the cost, friends. Count the cost of accusation.