“No brother of mine will play the flute.”
These are the words my older brother uttered—pronounced, more like—decreed, even—as I, a ten-year-old transitioning from elementary school to middle, debated the merits of various instruments I might learn, in band class.
(I had been leaning toward flute.)
(I ended up going with clarinet.)
I was recently in a conversation where a friend said, approximately:
I feel you’re on stronger ground, Duncan, when you say that the status quo is unfairly blocking some people from activities they spontaneously want to do and (you argue) safely could in a different society.
I feel less comfortable when you dig for reasons that other people’s aversions to touch or sexual activity or whatever might be “unhealthy” (against some standard I’m not sure you’ve made a case for the universal healthiness of).
(I’m sort of dropping you into the deep end; you can probably figure out what sort of conversation it was.)
I had a lot of thoughts in response.
I think the statistical case for the unhealth of the younger generation is very strong, vis-a-vis depression, isolation, anxiety, etc. I’m reminded of that meme:
Like, asexuals absolutely exist (and are a completely healthy type of human), but also we know the rough base rate for asexuality and the stuff we’re seeing with younger generations staying at home and touching no one ever and living on social media and masturbation exceeds that rate, by a lot.
(And it’s not like there aren’t obvious causes—things happening that are unprecedented in our social and evolutionary history, that you would expect to fuck people up in the very ways we’re seeing people get fucked up. It’s a deer in the subway prior—the vast majority of possible departures from equilibrium are not improvements, or at least not straightforwardly/costlessly so.)
In general, if someone seems elsewise completely happy and healthy and well-adjusted, then I certainly don’t question their sexuality or their aversion to touch or whatever. It’s mostly just that I’ve almost never seen a person who had a strong aversion to touch who otherwise did, in fact, seem completely healthy and happy and well-adjusted. Something like 9 out of 10 people that I’ve met who had strong touch aversions were also visibly maladjusted in the same way that you would expect from the stereotype of an animal that was cringing away from normal touch (e.g. from other members of its own species).
The 1 out of 10 does exist!
But it’s a strong prior.
To put it another way: if someone is like “Yeah, I am wildly outside of the distribution for desiring touch, and also I’m deeply fucked up in this other way, but don’t worry, I swear, those things are totally unrelated, the touch thing is #valid,” I squint at them.
Healthy person who is touch-averse: sure, range of preferences; different people exist.
Unhealthy person: I bet on entanglement.
Then some time passed, and I felt the need to keep adding clarifications, and I came to the insight that’s at the core of this essay:
Oh, also: hopefully it’s clear that, even if the touch aversion is part of a complex of maladjustments, the answer is obviously not to brute-force override their touch preferences, in the moment. Like, even a malignant touch aversion is still real! To the extent that you want to help them fix it (and they want that, too), you can’t just “should” it away.
A random human saying “your touch preferences are Wrong” is indeed likely to do or advocate a bunch of abhorrent shit that I also agree is wrong, and vocally advocate against—someone’s traumatic adjustment to unhealthy circumstances is often itself pretty well-adjusted, in the sense of making the available best of a bad situation.
(e.g. slowing down in winter, which I recently argued against pathologizing, even though winter itself was not really present in our African ancestral experience and there’s a decently strong argument that we’re not really adapted for it and therefore the slowing-down is more of a cope than a straightforward natural good.)
Here’s the thing about what my brother had to say, regarding the flute:
The boys in our middle school and high school who did play the flute did not do well, as a class.
That’s … mostly an indictment of the local culture. Like, it’s bad if your school bullies and hazes people because a) for some reason everybody has decided that one’s choice of musical instrument is a Gender Thing™ and b) if you pick the wrong one then you’re some kind of Wrong, yourself, and c) the correct response to that is to torment you for seven years.
That’s bad.
And also. That was the reality of the situation.
There’s a sort of wishful thinking that I’ve written about at length, before, where a certain kind of Good Parent™ might look at the situation and go “That’s stupid. You shouldn’t be constrained in your choice of musical instrument by small-minded bullies and hicks. Get your shoes, we’re going to get you a flute right now.”
And in the moment, I probably would have felt a rush of satisfaction and validation, and appreciation for the support.
And then I would’ve spent seven years one layer further down in hell.
The actual choice before me was not, in fact, “costlessly choose the thing you want” versus “kowtow to the fickle whims of a broken society.”
It was “spend a large fraction of your finite points here, on this specific battle,” versus “keep your head down and enjoy playing the next-most-appealing instrument in relative peace.”
(The clarinet was also fraught, by the way—just somewhat less so. There was a rather awkward moment when Philip Howard and I got to high school, and the band divided up by instrument to go off and practice, and the clarinetists headed for the girls’ locker room, because that’s where the clarinetists had always gone to practice.)
A lot of shit is broken in the world right now.
And a lot of our responses to that broken shit are themselves broken. Masking. Being closeted. Self-medicating. Doom scrolling. Hiding. Lashing out.
Sometimes, those broken responses can be self-reinforcing. They can start a vicious spiral that digs you further, and further, and further. Political polarization begets further political polarization; touch-starved people often become averse to touch, and this sucks. There’s something there that is important to fix, before it crosses the point of no return.
But the way to fix it isn’t to ignore the problem. You don’t cure someone of their arachnophobia by tossing a box of spiders at them. Coping strategies are there for a reason, and you almost never improve a situation by yanking away the crutch.
My friend heard me loudly pathologizing certain signatures of the younger generation (such as their social isolation and touch aversion) and got nervous, because when people start saying “X is unhealthy and wrong,” they often move pretty quickly to doing something about it, and the cure is often worse than the disease.
His objection was sound, and reasonable.
(And I’m glad he lodged it openly, because it was a good reminder to back up and be explicit about not taking an ill-advised next step. I had forgotten to emphasize that part, because I had taken it for granted.)
People from Agor are a tiny, tiny bit more sane, when it comes to stuff like that. We intentionally practice the habit of being able to acknowledge that a thing is broken and bad while not taking any action in response, because we know that hasty action is likely to make things even worse.
(The axiom “most possible departures from equilibrium are not improvements” applies just as well to the new equilibrium of [problem] + [coping strategy]. By the time someone has developed a coping strategy, they’ve usually already searched the space of possibility at least a little, and found a local balance that minimizes the bad stuff, such that any single step in any direction is unlikely to be better. The fix in such cases usually requires changing two or three or four things all at once, and that kind of intervention takes care and forethought and patience and humility.)
It was wrong for the people at my school to harass boys for playing “girly” instruments.
It was also wrong for my brother to trample all over my personal sovereignty, and (essentially) take away from me the freedom to choose which instrument I would play for the next seven years.
But those two wrongs did add up to a right. Or at least, they left me in the least wrong situation that was actually available, given all of the constraints. There are a lot of things I might change, if given access to a time machine, but “play the flute instead of the clarinet” isn’t one of them.
(An even better move would’ve been to just give me an accurate map of where the fenceposts were, and then let me make a truly informed decision, but my brother was only thirteen; he, too, was doing his best. (Also there would’ve been costs to him of me playing the flute, and he had a right to care about those.))
It takes more than mere wishing to get out of the darkworld. In the meantime, while you’re here, you have to make do.
BTW my novel Pass is still going up online; chapter three is set to go out on Friday morning. I probably won’t keep reminding everyone, but I would love it if you read it and left a comment.
A sad historical footnote: this brother has since thoroughly and explicitly disavowed his relationship to me, stating more than once, in unequivocal terms, that I am in fact no brother of his (even though I didn’t ever play the flute).