Why Nobody Likes Me

I am a "misfit." A bad fit. Questions tend to cluster, so that people who ask Question A also ask Question B. Answers tend to cluster as well. People who accept Answer C tend also to accept Answer D.

There is some sense to this, of course. Questions and answers match up like couples at the prom. Just as you don’t go to a macroeconomics convention and start talking about the role of sin in poverty, so you don’t go to a course on systematic theology as start talking about GDP. It isn’t the position of the economists that there is no such thing as sin or that it can’t affect economic prosperity; rather, it’s that “sin” is an “answer” from another universe of discourse and they don’t want to be troubled by it.

But if I were at that convention, I might be interested in it. I find some answers interesting, even when I am with a question-defined group. I find some questions interesting, even when I am with an answer-defined group. And that’s why nobody likes me. Well, actually, it isn’t that they don’t like me; it’s just that when they see me coming, they start to circle the wagons.


Let me offer an example. For the last decade or so, I’ve been interested in sex roles. Our library has a journal titled Sex Roles. Here are some questions I began with when I started being interested in sex roles. What are they for? Why are violations of a society’s sex roles punished? What do the punishers get out of doing the punishing, given that it is a non-remunerated (volunteer) task? Would clearer sex roles be better? How? Would more ambiguous sex roles be better? For whom?

I couldn’t find any answers at all. None of the scholars I located was interested in the questions I was asking and, as you see, my questions are not in scholarly form. So it seemed to me that the people who could answer the questions I was asking didn’t care about the questions. Articles on sex role stereotyping abounded. It’s bad. Articles on tolerance of cross-gendered behavior abounded. It’s good.

Clearly, however, it costs us a fair amount to inculcate gender norms and to police them and we keep on doing it, year after year. It must be good for something.

Maybe a political example would help. I am a political and economic liberal. Pretty standard issue. For the other issues—religious, social, intellectual, and aesthetic (RSIA)—I am pretty conservative. Worse, I think I might be conservative for different reasons in each case. My aesthetic conservatism, for instance, is likely no more than ignorance. And in religion, I am a liberal as religious people judge things. But in politics, being religious at all, unless you are a black Protestant, is a kind of conservatism.

So when I attend the liberal pep rallies—sorry, when I was in school, we had “pep rallies” and they came out of instructional time—I do the cheers and yell at the times everyone else is yelling. Until the other questions come up: the RSIA questions I named above. Then I shut up and sit down and all my liberal buddies look at me funny. It isn’t any better at the conservative pep rallies, except that I am odd man out on the P and E issues and one of the guys on RSIA issues.

The root question is on what grounds do you want to curb individualism? I think there are not many good reasons in the political and economic spheres. Let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend. When we get to families and schools and clubs and neighborhoods, I think there are often grounds for curbing individualism.

Religious questions? Yeah, there too. I am inclined toward scholarship on biblical issues. The question in my mind is, “What does the text say?” Part of that is pushing off of my literalist past, but some of it is just my enjoyment of good scholarly work. My conservative friends see me coming and circle the wagons. This guy is going to play fast and loose with Holy Scriptures. My liberal friends see me coming and circle the wagons. Maybe it’s just one set of wagons and they share them as they need them, I don’t know. The liberals say this guy is still stuck on biblical texts, when all of us know that when you take into account [fill in name of non-textual concern here] these texts just can’t be taken seriously.

So I see the outside face of a lot of wagons, circled. Ah well.