SUPERSTITION & The Dark Knight Shootings (part 1)

This is part 1 of a two-part post our current social world.

The essence of superstition is to believe something despite all knowledge otherwise[1]. Examples:

• If I walk under a ladder, I’ll have bad luck.
• If a black cat crosses my path, I’ll have bad luck.
• If I come out of the closet, people will reject me or hurt me.
• If I don’t wash my hands after going to the bathroom, I’ll get sick.
• If I see the Dark Knight Rises, I’ll be shot by a madman.
• If I move to a new town, bad things might happen.
• If my spouse walks to work, he’ll be mugged or worse.
• If we don’t build a wall on the border with Mexico, the US will be overrun.

Obviously, I chose these examples to illustrate and broaden what I am proposing we understand as a superstition. Amongst what I would call the salient details at work in these superstitious conjectures, one in particular seems important above all else: they all hinge on unanswerable arguments.

What is important for us today is not that someone might actually seriously believe that walking under a ladder will bring bad luck; what matters is that, even when we know better, we still don’t walk under ladders. It is precisely for this reason that I walk under ladders; I am not going to hold myself hostage to what my thinking is doing at that moment.

Of course, walking under ladders doesn’t bring bad luck—belief in bad luck itself is already a popular superstition—but the thought may still cross one’s mind, “But what if it does?” On the basis of this laughable assertion of a possibility, we then hedge our bets and don’t run the risk of offending the gods of bad luck or whatnot. Resisting this kind of thinking is why people record themselves on Youtube blaspheming the Holy Spirit (i.e., publically commit the unforgiveable sin).

This is what I mean by an unanswerable argument. For all that we know walking under ladders doesn’t cause bad luck, the rejoinder “but it might” cannot be answered. Imagine a dialogue between two people: A; “Walking under ladders doesn’t cause bad luck.” B: “But it might.” A: “No, it does not.” B: “But it might.” Unless A walks away, this will never end with B admitting or coming to realize that the insistence here upon a possibility is, if not bogus outright, then utterly negligible. So, over against the idea that walking under ladders is bad luck, one might usefully ask, “Is that really plausible?” So, to no small extent, superstitions insist on “blackmailing” us with arguments based (spuriously or not) on possibilities, which can (or might at least otherwise) be viewed in terms of plausibilities.

Revisiting the initial list again, thinking in these terms:

• If I walk under a ladder, I’ll have bad luck.
• If a black cat crosses my path, I’ll have bad luck.
• If I don’t wash my hands after going to the bathroom, I’ll get sick.
• If I come out of the closet, people will reject me or hurt me.
• If I see the Dark Knight Rises, I’ll be shot by a madman.
• If I move to a new town, bad things might happen.
• If my spouse walks to work, he’ll be mugged or worse.
• If we don’t build a wall on the border with Mexico, the US will be overrun.

For your own sake, it is worth noting which of the above you laugh off as obviously and absurdly neither plausible or possible and which you are not so sanguine about.

Obviously, when people argue (with others or with themselves) about possibilities, they must implicitly take the thing to be plausible. However, certain kinds of possibilities, in order to be plausibilities, presuppose a shift of premise that itself may be groundless. A most notorious example of this is Pascal’s Wager, where he argues (logically enough, if to the great affront of Faith itself) that one loses nothing by believing in the biblical deity[2]. The argument hinges, in part, on the possibility that the biblical deity exists, but this possibility cannot be turned into a plausibility except by rejecting the whole of lived existence and substituting in its place a vastly different explanation for “life.” There is no question that, in the western monotheistic traditions, there has been no shortage of effort expended to interpret the nonexistence of the biblical deity in terms of faith (e.g., “invisibility is the form of god”; “silence is the voice of god”). The point is that, in everyday life, between two competing explanations, we almost invariably (however much this might be a problem) pick the explanation that accords with lived-experience. So if my prayer isn’t answered, I can thank the divine for unanswered prayers or I can—in a manner far more consistent with all of the other kinds of decisions I make each day about which explanation to follow—conclude that prayer isn’t an effective intervention. I am mentioning this not to bash religion, but to point out how the elision of possibilities into plausibilities is not necessarily a legitimate move, though it is a popular one.

I’ve gotten into some surprisingly contentious arguments about this when I attack the superstition, “If I don’t wash my hands after going to the bathroom, I’ll get sick.” The most I’ll grant here is that if I don’t wash my hands after going the bathroom (in a public restroom), then I may be increasing my exposure to infection. Let us be precise. In order to become “sick” (whatever that means, as opposed to the more precise “become infected”), there must be some germs present in the public restroom that I am likely to be susceptible to. It is of course possible that such infectious germs may be present, but is it plausible? In order to make such a determination, one would have to be a bit of an expert on this particular bathroom, to say nothing of knowledgeable about what sort of infections I’m susceptible to. In the face of this claimed plausibility, which I’ve encountered from adamant people, is the empirical experience (I have had) that not washing my hands after going to the bathroom has not made me sick. In fact, I can say that I know of no moment in my life when failing to wash my hands after going to the bathroom could be causally linked to me being infected to the point where I would describe myself as sick.

The people who make this argument to me are not necessarily neurotic hand-washers, although that class of person will be a leading and loud advocate of this superstition. But this points to the fact that the more “normalized” a superstition is, the more there will be pseudo-rational arguments to try to make it plausible. I say pseudo-rational because the quite evidently empirical medical fact about how infections occur in human bodies is leveraged here in an inapplicable context and toward an irrelevant end. That is, the universe of the neurotic hand-washer (and milder advocates of this superstition) is not one where a “public policy” of hand-washing would begin first by performing an actual risk assessment in any given (public) bathroom setting to determine whether or not hand-washing in this particular instance is actually necessary, but rather proceeds from the premise that piss or shit daubed fingers are unnerving and disgusting. A quasi-sophisticated version of this leverages notions like “herd immunity” and the socio-moral responsibility of not becoming a carrier of such germs (to other people). Again, the legitimacy of these observations in their proper contexts is illegitimately marshaled the advocate of the superstition’s purpose. Nor am I saying that any such policy of hand-washing could be or should be determined in this way; my object is only to point out that what is ultimately and relentlessly at root in the insistence “you should wash your hands after going the bathroom or you’ll get sick” is no better argument than “well, you might.”[3]

In any case, I suspect most people are definitively certain that walking under ladders, letting black cats cross their paths, and even not washing their hands after going to the bathroom[4] will have untoward consequences, even if people don’t readily admit the last.[5] But when it comes to the threat of potential violence if one comes out of the closet, the pseudo-rationality of the argument acquires a much thicker shell. In part, this is because the anticipated consequences are more dire. If with black cats and ladders, the threat consisted of the numinous but vague “bad luck” and with not washing one’s hands merely the unpleasant but transient “illness,” with the social consequences of rejection for being queer one faces both physical violence outright and all manner of potential social violence (e.g., loss of work, inability to get work, loss of social status, &c).

A disadvantage of using “if I come out of the closet, people will hurt me” as an example is that it may make you feel the example has nothing to do with you. Almost no one lives wholly without some piece of personal information they are not “out” about, and which they keep to themselves to avoid (pseudo-rational) consequences. Again, just as the superstition of hand-washing inappropriately leverages empirical medicine to argue for its plausibility, so the very real, ongoing, and potentially ubiquitous violence against people who are queer-identified provides potentially excellent arguments for not being out. I am in no way suggesting that such violence is “all in one’s head”; rather, it is most definitely committed by bigots, &c. But, one of the main differences between being in the closet as opposed to out is that the condition of the former is marked by potential awareness of violence 24/7 and in the latter only in those circumstances where one (more or less validly) determines that such violence is, in fact, likely[6]. The advantage of using this superstition is the experience countless queer-identified people have reported upon coming out. I like to say that I have never met anyone who regretted coming out of the closet; for the sake of completeness, I’ll say there have been two people in my life who claimed to know someone who regretted coming out. There have been people who resented being outed. &c. The issue here is not to bog down in the details of the example, but to point to the greater leverage we can get with ourselves because, in this case, the consequences of going “against” the superstition can be so much more dire (up to and including death), but also the immense relief that people report from not giving in to this superstition any longer. I am surely not alone in reporting the vast difference between the “paranoia” of my closeted existence and the overwhelmingly absent amount of direct violence as a “faggot” I have subsequently experienced. The point is not that I have not been beaten up, of course. The point is that I have not spent decades living constantly with that worry or fear.

Partly, this is exactly because of the direness of the consequences. To go out into the world everyday anticipating the worst violence on the off chance that someone figured out my sexuality was, of course, heavily tiresome and wearing. The clear implication is that the liberation of similar heavy and wearing superstitions in our lives equally portends that much relief. In prisons (one could cite historical and current examples as well), one’s reputation is (arguably) all one has. The pseudo-rational fear (pseudo-rational insofar as it is rooted factually in certain kinds of epistemologies in prisons but here inappropriate extended to cover every waking minute of the day) that if anyone “thinks ill” of you, you will be made to suffer in some way (e.g., your shit will be taken, you will be made into someone’s prison bitch, you will lose social status and thus access to the things that will meet your needs). Here again, the consequences of not taking this superstition seriously (“if I don’t maintain my reputation, people will take advantage of me”) are dire but the emotional cost of maintaining this superstition 24/7 are self-evidently not worth it, once the risk is taken not to worry 24/7 about this. Zillions of people who are queer identified have discovered, somewhat to their chagrin or embarrassment, that all the fuss they imagined about coming out turns out to be wrong—that for the overwhelmingly vast number of people, no one gives a shit that you’re gay[7]. So the man who is hypersensitive about his reputation discovers (perhaps thanks to a particularly humiliating public experience) that his touchiness was not well placed (even after the public disaster).

Hopefully it is not controversial to say that most of us are not happy to avoid living the life we’d rather be living because we feel we must act a certain way in order to avoid undesirable consequences. For something simple, like not walking under a ladder, we don’t “mind the sacrifice,” in particular because the consequences of disobeying aren’t so dire. Similarly, whatever 20 seconds of time wasted to rinse one’s fingers in a public restroom sink (never mind that studies show the sink to be the dirtiest area of a public bathroom—oh the irony!) may be called a sacrifice, perhaps it’s not really “warping the fabric of our lived experiences.” It is the smallness of this “sacrifice” that makes it unproblematic in general.  But where the threat of violence starts to loom, as with coming out of the closet, it becomes much more ubiquitous and depressing to maintain the superstition. This is exactly why hand-washing is actually a “trauma” for the neurotic hand-washer; it is precisely because the consequences of not washing one’s hands are construed in a very dire way—a way far more dire than most of us would credit[8].

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[1] I’m tempted to say “rational” knowledge otherwise, but why I eschew this adjective will become clear soon enough.

[2] On atheistic grounds one obviously loses a tremendous deal, perhaps one’s wholly terrestrial existence, but this was obviously not what mattered to Pascal.

[3] It’s slightly gratuitous to continue this point, but some medical science suggests that excessively hygienic people actually increase their susceptibility to infection, because their immune systems are never tested in the trial by fire of infections. To whatever extent this proves true, the other arguments (about herd immunity and any social obligation not to pass along infectious germs) obviously must be similarly modified by this medical insight.

[4] There must doubtless be a gendered distinction here. I would expect males to be more convinced that women’s fingers are filthier after urinating and vice versa. Males (even gay ones) seem to be little in the habit of freaking out over the possibility that the man whose hand they are shaking may have recently touched his penis. To whatever extent we guys “keep our junk clean,” we can count on other males to do so as well—that is, we have no trouble assuming that, if we even think of it at all, which is probably rarely the case. Besides, it’s not as if we douse our fingers in piss as we urinate, so that the more probable source of any “grossness” in a bathroom will be assumed to be not our trusty and beloved penis but that loathsome cloaca of the flush handle, &c. Reasonable as this assumption may seem, this explanatory framework would still have to offer how the flush handle became that loathsome cloaca in the first place, if nothing but hygienic healthy genitals have been handled in the room. Doubtless, shit is the culprit—its viscous clinginess, the proximity of fingers (separated only by a tissue-layer of paper), &c. Because, seriously, while we might be able to count on people (guys) to not wag things around so vehemently that piss flies all over everything, isn’t there (honestly) just too much at risk when we’re asked to trust that some guy running his fingers over his anus hasn’t come into contact with the tiniest speck of feces? Finally, at last, we come to the heart of darkness, to the moment and presence of evil itself. Which is all to say, advocates of the hand-washing superstition will feel they are on much stronger, much less assailable ground, when insisting that people who have taken a shit should wash their hands.

[5] Somewhere there are those amusing or sad studies that demonstrate: people are more likely to use a sink to wash their hands in a public restroom if they know there is someone else in the restroom with them, than if not. If it helps you to be honest with yourself, I’ll readily confess this is often the case with me—more precisely, I feel a sense of being judged (imagined or not) when I walk out of a public restroom without washing my hands. This whole cognitive process is itself superstition. I can argue to myself that it’s plausible someone in the bathroom might judge me, and however much I insist that is not the case, I can always come back with, “But they might.” This points up clearly how the issue ultimately has nothing at all to do with “what actually happens” in lived experience, but rather the virtual anticipation of what might happen, and the decisions we (all) make in light of those virtual anticipations.

[6] Even in these “likely” scenarios, one can frequently be surprised. Where being out at work is imagined as impossible, it may turn out otherwise; where one is certain family gatherings will be a hotbed of rejection, it turns out otherwise. It may be going out on a limb to say this, but it seems that (whether one is in or out of the closet) the actual, predictable source of violence toward oneself will, in general, not actually be predictable. One can only learn by risking and experimenting. And at least in principle—as also the whole purpose of learning anything at all in life in the first place—the more one knows, the more one may become able to negotiate the terrain of life, even if violence still pops up out of unforeseen (or unforeseeable) circumstances. This may be akin to the fatuous notion that one can eliminate accidents; by definition, an accident is the thing that cannot be avoided. In fact, it may be that we often excuse our own inattentiveness and irresponsibility by claiming things were accidents that we actually might have reasonably done more to avoid.

[7] This actually has its own set of social problematics, but that’s for another essay.

[8] I’m a bit of a purist—if the consequences of walking under ladders or not washing one’s hands are really of no small moment, then we should with equal “freedom of spirit” walk under ladders and wash or not wash our hands. As soon as it becomes obvious that our thinking is being manipulated in such a way that the equal choice between “walking under a ladder or not” or “washing one’s hands or not” disappears, then we have veered back into the territory of the superstition. It would be a mistake, however, to construe “always walking under ladders” or “never washing one’s hands” as a neurotic compulsion, when it is done on principle, precisely in protest of the superstition.