What's Wrong With "Just As Bad"

My sixth grade class has been working on persuasive essays. One student - let’s call him A - chose to write his essay about why the Electoral College should be abolished (a topic with which I am somewhat familiar). At one point in his writing, A mentions that one of the original purposes of the Electoral College was to prevent a tyrant from coming to power and then comments that, in 2016, it actually allowed a tyrant to become President.

(For the record, there’s no indoctrination going on here. Other students have written about why Trump will be the greatest President in history.)

While A was reading this part of his essay to the class, I watched another student - B - open up his Chromebook. I was initially going to scold him for this, since it looked an awful lot like inattention or rudeness, but then I saw what he was doing. He was googling the definition of “tyrant.” A cool example of how technology aids learning, for sure; certainly it’s hard to imagine any actual sixth grader voluntarily pulling out a dictionary and flipping through it in order to understand an unfamiliar word used by a classmate. Also a good example of why teachers should sometimes hold our tongues and give our students the benefit of the doubt. That is what I thought the significance of the event was going to be, anyway.

When we opened things up for questions and comments, B raised his hand and offered this: “I agree with most of what you said about the Electoral College and stuff, but I don’t think you should call anyone a tyrant. It’s not very nice.”

At which Student C piped up: “Yeah, it’s kind of bullying.”

Bullying? Seriously? An eleven-year-old kid is bullying the President of the United States by calling him a mean name in a paper? I think most adults (with the exception of said POTUS) would find the idea absurd. But within that sixth grade class the general consensus seemed to be this: Student A made some good points, but then he took it “too far.”

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“He who fights monsters should see to it that he himself does not become a monster.”

This Nietzsche quote (plus the really stupid second line about the abyss) is pretty darn famous. It’s the second thing to come up when you search “famous nietzsche quotes” on Google (even if you bastardize the spelling). It’s got its own TVTropes page. And it’s featured in a ton of media. (The most recent example I’ve seen is the Netflix show 13 Reasons Why, though if it was supposed to connect to the plot in any way, I missed it. (Who’s the one fighting monsters? Clay? Hannah? The only character it applies to at all is Tyler, but he’s such a minor character, and besides, we don’t even know if he did anything yet. But anyway.))

But more than the quote itself, I think we as a culture are sort of obsessed with the idea that it expresses, which probably predates Nietzsche. We love stories where the good guy turns out to be “just as bad” as the people he was fighting against - or better yet, in a moment of introspection, he realizes that he is about to cross that symbolic threshold and stops himself, usually sparing the life of his antagonist.

The very face of evil

Or stories where the hero has to stop/kill/defeat someone from “their side” because that person had taken the fight against monsters too far and become one. Katniss Everdeen shooting Coin at the end of Mockingjay. (Oh, right. Spoiler warning. But the book came out seven years ago, so I’m pretty sure the statute of limitations is up.) Or Steven Universe deciding to neutralize the character Bismuth because she was willing to commit violence against those who were trying to destroy the planet. (I tried to explain that in a way that you could understand the point even if you’ve never seen Steven Universe, mainly so I didn’t have to use phrases like “sentient alien gems.”) Or pick any one of the thousands of other examples. The idea is everywhere and, like any popular idea, it affects our real lives.

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I think I first heard that Nietzsche quote when I was around fourteen, and I loved it. It fit in perfectly with (and allowed me to justify) my worldview at that time, which was essentially that literally everyone was full of shit except for me. The popular kids were terrible, obviously - that was practically an axiom within my group of friends. But it was starting to seem like the emo/scene/whatever subculture that I had fallen into was just as problematic, just as cliquey and elitist. Being a “nonconformist,” in practice, really just meant conforming to a different set of expectations: liking different music, wearing different clothes, etc. This became one of the major themes of the novel I wrote in eighth grade. (Yes. It’s awful. It was also intended to be the first book of a five-book series. Remember that - it will be relevant later.)

So, with the support of a nineteenth-century German philosopher whose name I couldn’t even pronounce, I could feel smugly superior to both groups (not unlike in this comic). And there is something very appealing about this way of looking at the world. For one thing, it saves you the trouble of having to figure out who is in the right in a given situation. You can just assume that everyone is wrong in one way or another and then go on doing and thinking exactly what you were doing and thinking beforehand. (As far as I can tell, that’s basically the central conceit of South Park: the people in charge are full of shit, the people trying to change things are just as bad, so fuck anyone who cares about anything, basically.) It’s an easy way out of any dilemma - a sort of casual, apathetic nihilism.

And there certainly are times that it applies - the French Revolution, for instance. I think it’s generally agreed upon that Robespierre and his bros ended up being at least as despotic and murderous as the monarchy they overthrew. And I think you could make a solid case that the Russian Revolution followed a similar path, taking the utopian promises of Marx and distorting them until they became Stalinism. (At least if, like me, everything you know about communism comes from Animal Farm.)

But the quote means that it’s possible for a monster-hunter to become a monster. Not that it’s inevitable. And we are way too eager to begin applying this narrative, especially to anyone who is part of a resistance movement. (For whatever reason, we hold people who are trying to effect change to a much higher standard than we hold those who preserve the status quo.) Hence the charges of “bullying” President Trump by saying mean things about him, levied against both Student A and professional journalists. I also think this same trope is to blame for the widespread belief in concepts like “reverse racism” or “reverse sexism” - that things have changed so much in the past however-many years that now white men are being discriminated against.

Look at this nerd. Look at this four-eyed geek. 

We believe so strongly in the idea of the oppressed becoming the oppressors, in the image of a pendulum swinging back and forth, that we react to the slightest movement in the pendulum as an indication that it has swung all the way over to the other side. It’s kind of like when a dog hears a knock on the door and instinctively reacts like the house is being demolished. A black person calling you “cracker,” or a feminist saying that she hates all men, or an LGBT group refusing to admit straight people - that’s a knock on the door. It may not be ideal, but it is certainly not “just as bad” as the discrimination and subjugation that happens the other way around.

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Take, for instance, the iconic moment in January when self-proclaimed “leader of the alt-right” Richard Spencer got punched in the face. There were some people who reacted to this with glee - which is kind of weird, I guess - but there were also many people, liberals, that reacted to the event with a sort of admonishment: “We shouldn’t resort to violence!" “Doesn’t this behavior make us just as bad as him?”

But, like, no. It doesn’t. Richard Spencer wants to forcibly remove all non-white people from the continent. He responded to the attack on the mosque in Quebec City by asking why there are mosques in Quebec City in the first place. He once published on his website an article that “posed the question” of whether it is right to commit genocide against the black race. (Even after I wrote the first draft of this paragraph on Saturday, Spencer apparently wanted to make sure I had enough examples to fill it out, so he participated in a protest to preserve a statue of Robert E. Lee, complete with torches to make sure no one missed the parallels to the KKK.) 

Punching someone in the face isn’t nice, but it is not “just as bad” as being a Nazi.

We are still pretty far away from Nietzsche-quote territory if all we’re doing is punching Nazis in the face. And even further if we respond to the event with a collective shudder of guilt and horror at the monsters we’ve become. 

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Jesus of Nazareth supposedly said that if someone slapped you on one cheek, the right thing to is to turn the other cheek and let them slap that one, too. But that’s easy for him to say, with all that Last Judgment shit looming on the horizon. He’s not refraining from retaliating; he’s just biding his time. But in the real world, we don’t have that luxury. Check your son of God privilege, bro.

An eye for an eye may leave the whole world blind, but allowing the town eye gouger to keep running his operation, offering up your left eye after he’s just stabbed you in your right - that doesn’t bode too well for vision, either.

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The current wave of social justice movements definitely has its problems, and these are worth acknowledging and discussing. They have a tendency to be insular, to care more about people using the correct language than having reasonable ideas, to be so obsessed with purity that they will deliberately cast out and publicly shame people who only agree with 99% of what the movement stands for. (Look at the times when liberals have called for Stephen Colbert’s show to be cancelled. He’s on our side, guys.) But these things do not make feminism “just as bad” as the patriarchy or make the Black Lives Matter movement “just as bad” as institutional racism.

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I used to think it was really awesome that the ACLU defended the free speech rights of the KKK. Now, I appreciate the argument that it’s dangerous to set the precedent that the government can censor unpopular speech, but I’m less into the whole this-shows-that-we’re-better-than-them aspect of it. Michelle Obama’s “they go low, we go high.” Because when “going high" means being permissive, being tolerant of intolerance to avoid the accusation of intolerance, it does wonders for one’s own sense of moral superiority, but doesn’t do much to help you win. 

Scrap that will sell for millions someday

(By the way, the fourth book of my five-book series was supposed to center around a political movement called Tolerantism, which was going to be the embodiment of that Nietzsche quote. Started with the best of intentions, the movement was going to gradually become corrupted as it became more focused on punishing those who were perceived to be intolerant, and it was all going to culminate in one character uttering the sentence, “Well, there are some things that we just can’t tolerate.” That was to be the looked-from-pig-to-man moment of the series, where the hypocrisy of Tolerantism was going to be revealed. I never got that far, thankfully. Because, like, what’s the alternative? Don’t try to be tolerant of others?)

After the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton quietly accepted the results, retreated into the woods, and has barely brought it up since. But there is a significant part of me that wishes she was still out there talking about how the election was rigged against her - about how the Electoral College and gerrymandering and Voter ID laws and all the Russia shit and the Republicans not even giving Merrick Garland a hearing is all part of a shameless power grab by the other side. Because it is. And liberals are never going to win again if we keep just turning the other cheek, if we continue to be so afraid of becoming monsters that we aren’t even willing to fight the ones that already exist.

I guess what it really comes down to is the distinction between deontological and utilitarian approaches to ethics. Do we want to feel morally superior or do we want to actually make the world less shitty for people? Do we care more about being able to look at ourselves in the mirror and tell ourselves that we’re better than the Nazis, or do we want a world with fewer Nazis?

What we absolutely need to stop doing, though, is pretending that we’re doing both. We need to end the delusion that “going high” and engaging in performative tolerance is itself a strategy to win. As if Nazis or KKK members - or even just partisan cheaters like Mitch McConnell - are going to suddenly notice how good our side is being and start playing by the rules. They don’t care about the rules. They only ever mention the rules as a way of getting us to shut up when we start to fight back. And it works.

They’re knocking over all the pieces on the chessboard and we’re patiently waiting for our turn so we can move our knight up two and over one.

We’ve got a long way to go before we reach “just as bad.”