Liz Bruenig and The Zero Dawn Dorlands
frankly, a long and boring article but I did put a lot of thought in and you can choose your own adventure and whether or not the adventure includes reading this
A few days ago, I clicked on a link to an article because I misunderstood its title. The headline, which has since been changed, was “‘Bad Art Friend’ and The Four Dawn Dorlands.” Dawn Dorland is the name of the main character, and “Bad Art Friend” the partial title, of a viral New York Times story about a kidney donation and a subsequent writing feud. I assumed the story would be about this Dawn Dorland and three random people who shared her name, mostly concerning how it affected the other three Dawn Dorlands when their name was all over the news. It sounded interesting, a little like Errol Morris’s weird Taco Bell commercials starring people named Ronald McDonald.
Instead the article was about four tellings of the same story involving one Dawn Dorland, or really, three tellings and then the author’s take, which I wasn’t particularly interested in. The author, Liz Bruenig, is kind of a “compassionate conservative,” embodying that term more than George W. Bush ever did though she doesn’t use it herself, who employs the lens of Christianity1 to examine sociopolitical issues. On the policy level, she generally arrives at humane suggestions along the lines of more social welfare, opposition to the death penalty, and better rights for incarcerated people. These things would be ideally said to the Christian right, but for reasons mostly beyond anyone’s control from the outside, they seem to have effectively walled themselves off from such commentary, and Bruenig is published instead in secular, center-liberal, more-or-less elite publications - formerly the The New York Times, now The Atlantic. A lot of her work, and the bulk of the work that seems to get the most circulation, caters right to these “liberal elite” audience, which seem to always be hungry for gently conservative critiques of liberals like themselves, or like their enemies within their social circles. Bruenig does this relatively successfully. In her social commentary, the refrain is often some sort of chiding of liberal America, and its various excesses and hypocrisies and impertinences, from the perspective of a wise, forgiving, tolerant-but-critical social conservative. Or a member of the liberal class who sees the value of conservatism, the story often goes. For example, the subheading of this Dawn Dorland article is “The main character’s flaws are a reflection of our own,” which makes me ask, what “our”? From what I could tell, “our” referred to the modern liberal elite, which Bruenig is a member of (in terms of access and platforms) but also isn’t (in terms of sympathies and other parts of her identity), and the “our” only reflects on the liberal elite part, not on the conservative part.
I’m never going to be an enthusiastic audience for this brand of criticism, or at least for the emergent pattern of her worldview. For one thing, the general style of critique seems to skip over the actual benefits of liberalism. Things like cosmopolitan culture and freedom of/from gender expression are really beautiful and give people life, and there’s a limit on how much I’m going to align with the social judgment of people who don’t seem to see these things at all, let alone see them as positive goods. That’s not to say there’s any “sin of bigotry” here or anything, or at least I don’t care if there is, but I just think her general social picture doesn’t include a lot of what I like about America and other places in the world. It also seems to focus disproportionately on the chiding of liberal elites, which is tiresome, and not because the behavior of liberal elites is any good. But (A) for the kind of criticism of the elites I find accurate and useful, I’m looking for commentary that has a deeper understanding of the purported liberal project, who can really critique its failures because they understand the stated goals. Or at least are critiquing it materially, looking at material failings, which are not uniquely liberal in origin. And (B) it’s part of a general trend where people talk about liberal elites and conservative normal people, and much less about conservative elites and liberal normal people, like your average not-very-powerful Democratic voter living in a city, which paints a disproportionate picture.2
For an example of (B) in Bruenig’s Dawn Dorland article, look at the following line:
Especially now, especially working within the arts, especially in educated and liberal-leaning circles, there’s a certain cachet in having been wounded, wronged, injured in some way—not only a cachet, but a near-limitless license for aggression.
I don’t think Bruenig’s wrong that you see this type of performance in educated and liberal-leaning circles in the arts, among other places, but I also don’t think the “especially”s check out with reality. For example, Donald Trump’s entire movement was predicated exactly on this - talking incessantly about being wronged, wounded, cheated, stolen from, and parlaying it into near-limitless license for aggression. A lot of conservatives or people with a conservative streak across all fields make more of being “cancelled” than whatever they were doing before their cancellation. People who have hard power or traditional social power get offended over small slights or the suggestion of accountability, and this defensive posturing is used to “reverse victim and offender” and blast the usurpers. But the idea that liberals are uniquely disgusting on this count is pretty popular, and there’s a huge variety of reasons for that, depending on who’s pressing the case.
But beyond my usual gripe with what I think’s a bit of a tiresome political narrative, the whole piece rubbed me the wrong way, and not necessarily because it was wrong. Bruenig clocks a few of the dynamics pretty well and writes with a sense of perspective. It’s just that the central question who is she, what kind of person is she, what are her flaws, isn’t the kind of thing I like. Even if you end up rejecting the idea of a good or bad person, you still end up with an essentially good and flawed person, which still speaks the language of personal essence.
I’d been more or less railing against this kind of notion for years, because I’m always applying these kind of essences all over the place, then finding it does me no good, and then getting mad at myself. I think it creates images that we overreact to, distracting us from deeds and being. But Bruenig’s article helped crystallize something for me, which is that this kind of essentializing has some sort of resonance with the Christian notion of sin, which only a few years ago I realized is not the universal notion of sin. Buddhism doesn’t really have sin - it’s centered in the moment. A lot of polytheistic religions apply the characterization to the gods, and let the people be people dealing with them. Judaism, which I’m only now really beginning to look at as a religion rather than a cultural identity and a set of actions, doesn’t have much of an internal model of the soul. At its best points, Judaism, with the help of the Old Testament, a mostly bad3 but occasionally beautiful and strange4 book, accepts both the innermost and outermost workings of the world as an unknowable mystery. Where sin starts is primarily when you harm another member of the community5 (and you have to work hard to genuinely rectify the situation and get forgiveness) or secondarily when you violate any of many of the tedious rules (which can usually be rectified simply by muttering prayers, which for some reason are always done devoid of emotion, which I like because it leaves you alone, free of unnecessary emotional labor, though I don’t mutter prayers or obey the tedious rules myself anyway). From what I understand, Islam keeps the reward structure of Christianity, but not so much the internal model, more weighing general good and bad, which also seems sensible.
That’s not to throw all of Christianity under the proverbial bus. First, while it hasn’t, in my opinion, succeeded in creating a just and moral society or a psychologically sound population, it doesn’t seem like any of the other religions have managed that trick either, and Christianity did have some pretty good innovations, centrally with the story of Jesus the alleged Christ, whose actions were generally pretty great, extending goodwill and neighborliness to all and standing with underdogs and outcasts and against the powerful and such, and occasionally hilarious, like getting left behind in Jerusalem because Joseph and Mary were distracted by a festival, and cursing a fig tree because he was hungry and it didn’t have any figs for him. Dying on a cross for the sins of all mankind, surprisingly not his last act, didn’t seem to do anyone any practical good and distracted from his more sensible work, but we all have some stinkers. And this sort of inward reflection on sin probably serves, if used sparingly enough, a larger project of being a better person, again if used sparingly. Plus there are lots of Christian sects, notably to my knowledge the Quakers and Shakers and it wouldn’t shock me if this also included some Bellyachers, who are very focused on community and deeds, whether or not they also deal with this sin business I don’t know, and of course many people who were into the sin business, strange as it may be to me, produced some good deeds and great works anyway, and there’s no reason to police their methodologies if they say it works for them.
Nor is it to say that non-Christians don’t subscribe to this notion also. As I said, I find myself caught up in it all the time. Like most of my traits and ideas, I don’t know where I got it from. One sort of sketchy idea is that I’m a generally secular American, and a lot of our secular ideas of morality are symbolically derived from Christianity. Certainly you get a lot of people accusing liberals or youngsters of establishing a “new secular religion,” and there’s some truth to that, especially where you can see Christian-styled morality models, although I think it’s a little hyped up too, and even where it’s true it doesn’t seem any worse than the religious religions, or the old secular religions, or whatever these very upset people subscribe to, because they don’t seem really like broad humanists. Anyway, another possibility is that these things are more universal than Christianity and my distinction itself is a little farfetched, or maybe I just tend to feel bad or good at some given time and I’m telling stories that fit that inner emotion, but are really just superstition on top of feeling, who knows.
The point is, whatever this thing I call “Christian notion of sin,” when I notice it coming into my thinking, I might wanna make it a note to avoid it. The great thing is, you don’t really need to know that much about yourself or your essential characteristics to do the right thing more often. Essentially you need a realistic psychological model in the moment, and some decent systemic analysis to help correlate your actions with bigger things that may be beyond your personal instincts to predict. And of course you need some values and ethics, which come from peers and experience or whatever you can get. There’s some value to “knowing yourself,” your tendencies and where things might come from, just so you can spot them and see them to either work around them or avoid them if you can, but you don’t have to get obsessive about it. And if, as a way to synthesize all these different tasks, the totalizing story of Christian sin helps you draw all that together, go on with it then, but like me you might find the knowledge that there are other paths available helpful.
Returning back to the Dawn Dorland story, yes, I’m skeptical of the project of trying to morally evaluate Dawn Dorland or her antagonist Sonya Larson. First, we can’t know them. They’re people whose entire selves can’t possibly be expressed in a story, and very few of us will ever meet them, much less know them. Second, the roles and traits we’re trying to assign them are kind of bogus anyway. And third, and refreshingly, we don’t have to, as we’re not their friends, we’re not on the juries of their long and exhausting lawsuits, and our judgment has no use and no power.
But we don’t really need to know them or evaluate them to get something out of the kidney story, which I did enjoy. Partly, it was a bizarre adventure with lots of twists and turns. I also liked that it was single text that a lot of people were digging into, which, in a certain phase of the game, was pretty fun. It was a little like the Bible - bizarre and incoherent, but it raised a lot of interesting questions. On an entertainment level, it was a little like a low-stakes, niche horror movie. People brought a lot of strife onto themselves through terrible decisions. In the theater, we always yell at them not to make those decisions6, but of course we need them to - otherwise there’s no horror movie. So it had a bit of pulp value, for a certain audience at least, and it got to a very weird place we wouldn’t have gotten otherwise, which is generally a fascinating thing, following a story into some heretofore unexplored corner of the world, or sometimes not the world but somewhere more interesting that’s been made up for the purposes of the story.
This story taking place, indeed, in our world, one thing that jumped out was that so many decisions were bad, egregiously bad, and there’s always value in bad decisions like that. For one thing, it shows us what not to do. A lot of the bad decisions were on the spectrum with things normal people would do, but so far gone off the normal scale that the sense of “whoa, don’t do that!” is almost universal. This is good, I think. The Christian moral code might say something like “let him who is without sin cast the first stone” or “you don’t know what’s in her heart,” but you don’t need to be without the sin or know someone’s heart to recognize a bad decision. “Noted,” you can say. “Better to go a different way.” Similar thought can be applied to the good actions, one of which is really extraordinary, donating a kidney, and through that a man is alive who would otherwise not be. Holy shit! Can your tissues do that? Why not do for a stranger what many do for the family? How healthy and secure do you need to be to give up a whole organ? What is stopping the more ordinary among us from giving blood at least? Another pretty impressive, if not necessarily good, action was Sonya Larson’s trick of turning a gripe into a story, a story which impressed many readers, if not all of them, but rare is the story that accomplishes the latter. Is this how art is made, running obsessions, unhealthy though they may be, through some disciplined creative process? This too might be worth imitating, preferably without the slew of unnecessary and sloppy mistakes that were made in this particular story.
In addition to these sort of individual choices, which made it a cautionary tale, there are multifarious ethical dilemmas, which are different than moral lessons, to my understanding, because there’s not really all this individual soul-level judgment. Maybe, and my religious knowledge is a little weak here, this ethical analysis aligns kind of with the Talmudic tradition, which is all about resolving disputes with our best shot at fairness. The Talmud, from what I remember, doesn’t really look much at the character of the people, but more at the nature of the dispute to figure out what kind of principles we might bring to bear to resolve it. Here you might ask, What is the contract of friendship? Who owns stories in art, and words? When is it right or wrong to take something to court? These things are rarely decisively resolved, except in court where they have to be, but they can be reasoned about, without having to know too much about these people or indeed the details of this case. One thing we’re trying is figure out how to resolve future disputes and hopefully pre-empt the situation entirely, by giving people some principles that steer them away from such folly.
The case also touches on systemic issues. A lot of the individual actions arise in reaction to larger things - a medical system where the technology exists to save lives with organs but organs are dearly wanted, a literary economy that leaves people fighting over symbolic scraps, social media platforms that nudge people toward worse behavior, a court system that can become hell if people are willing to press their disputes into it
People have all sorts of insight and lenses beyond my comprehension. Some people are critiquing the reporting, which may yield some interesting results eventually, once they get it all sorted. Hobbyists are picking apart the details like a True Crime case, which is a hobby I don’t share7 but to each their own. By now, I’m sure, there’s a great deal of tiresome internet commentary, and maybe it’s spilled off the internet onto televisions and printed pages, by participants in the sort of discussions you constantly see in which the same takes tend to be arrived at, using pieces of different tales that may or may not have happened. And I suppose we’ll all take of it what we will, Meanwhile, I can choose, whatever else I’ve done, including, apparently, the composition of this long and essentially inconclusive tale, to go about my day, and I’ll leave you with another kidney story I enjoyed, this one written by my old friend Sam West, or at least he was the one who wrote it as far as I remembered:
https://www.theonion.com/anonymous-philanthropist-donates-200-human-kidneys-to-h-1819594700
Bruenig herself is Catholic now, but was raised Methodist in the Dallas suburbs, and writes kind of syncretically in the vibe of mainstream white Christianity, in a way that seems legible to suburban white Protestants and Catholics alike, unlike her onetime NYT colleague Ross Douthat, who is a very specific niche of traditional Catholic that cannot, I believe, exist in high numbers anywhere. Bruenig writes the type of things I hear a lot of Christians saying, while Douthat often writes things from perspectives I’ve never seen expressed by any ordinary person, sometimes solving problems it seems only he was aware of and nobody is affected by outside his imagination, sometimes solving more popular problems through means nobody has considered either before or after reading his articles, and that is at least, if nothing else, something you can’t get elsewhere.
More than anything about Bruenig, this is a fault of the publications, The New York Times and The Atlantic, and the media environment in general - what’s interesting to me is how much the trend is driven by mainstream liberal publications, not just by the right-wing media ecosystem.
Sexist, warlike, insidery/outsidery, and incoherent - though the incoherence cuts both ways.
There’s an emergent pattern of randomness and lack of answers that I think really does describe the universe, and the idea that the chosen people are just chosen, but not otherwise special, is I think a really beautiful idea, though the “chosen people” thing also causes a lot of problems. The partnership with God, constantly being weighed out and negotiated, is interesting too, and there’s also just some really good weird stories. I’m listening to the Bible Brothers podcast, where my friend Dan Klein and some other TV comedy writer who I don’t really know anything about, read the Bible without knowing anything about it and approach it as a story, and it’s pretty fun.
In some traditions it seems like “the community” is really only Jews, reading between the lines of the Old Testament, where all sorts of harms are visited on outsiders with no punishment, and looking at the situation in Israel, where it seems at least a large set of Jewish people are still living that way. Reform and Reconstructionist Judaism (and probably some subsets of the harder varieties too, but I wouldn’t know) heavily emphasize being part of a broader community, tikkun olam and whatnot, which I find more in line with my ethics in general, but who knows how consistently we’re actually living up to those ideals.
Unless we’re at a boring theater that has the wrong sense of politeness, and actually even if not when I say “we,” I actually don’t mean me, unless I’m very comfortable, I’m always yelling at the screen at home but deferring to others in the theater, though it wouldn’t be the same without yelling, this is if what’s being shown is a horror movie of course.
Although I think I might be into well-told stories of “true petty crime,” looking into the funniest things on the police blotter, or maybe “false pretty crime,” making up the best story you can about those same kind of minor crimes, and maybe American Vandal was a bit of both of these, at least in the first season, the second one getting too wacky and ungrounded for my taste.