Tag: sub-man

…the sub-man restricts himself as much as possible to the world; in an attempt to perhaps escape his shortcomings, or to excuse any attempt to try anything, he claims that nothing merits effort. Nothing is that meaningful or worthwhile. de Beauvoir says that the most harmful quality of the sub-man is that he is most likely to become one of a mob; ignorant rhetoric appeals easily to the sub-man, since that’s the easiest thing to listen to.

Then of the “serious man,” Hekker writes:

The “serious man” is one who dedicates his life staunchly to one particular cause, ideology, or set of values that he considers to be good. The serious man stops at nothing to achieve the cause, or embolden the ideology, even if it comes at the detriment of others. To de Beauvoir, the serious man doesn’t necessarily care about the cause as much as he does his ability to get lost in it. 

The “sub-man” caught my attention because it presents a picture of what some ideologies aim to do to us as humans. I’ll take my own field of work as an example. In education (and you’ll hear this rhetoric in traditional public, public charter, and various types of private schools), it’s common for higher ups to shame teachers with phrases like, “It’s for the kids!” Why should you accept lower pay? The kids. Why should you avoid self-advocacy in the work place? The kids. Why should you spend your own money on supplies, snacks, etc.? The kids. It’s not uncommon to be reminded that people don’t get into education, “for the money,” and this is true but manipulative. Usually, when teachers complain about their pay it’s not because they’re suddenly in it “for the money”; it’s because they want their basic needs met.

Beauvoir writes (in Bernard Frechtman’s translation, p. 49):

“…the sub-man plays the part of the inessential in the face of the object which is considered as the essential. He suppresses himself to the advantage of the Thing, which, sanctified by respect, appears in the form of a Cause, science, philosophy, revolution, etc. But the truth is that this rue miscarries, for the Cause can not save the individual insofar as he is a concrete and separate existence.”

When I read this, I thought immediately of the teacher who has become the “sub-man”. The “Cause” is “Education,” capital “E”. The sub-man becomes “inessential”. The teacher is exposable if they’re unwilling to sell themselves wholly to “the Cause”. If you Google articles about the rate of teacher resignations in the United States over the past half-decade, you’ll realize that many educators have concluded that they won’t be “inessential”. This is for good reason. Let’s remember that doing it “for the kids,” is rarely a statement made in good faith. The politician, the board member, the administrator, etc., may believe that they believe in what they’re saying to teachers but often, for a variety of reasons, people in the aforementioned roles choose to ignore the systemic failures of education (e.g. teaching to the test, grade inflation, the rat-race of the college admissions process and the portfolio building we’ve hoisted on children). But beyond the bad faith use of manipulative phrases like “do it for the kids,” is the sad reality that if we deconstruct this phrase we’ll realize that (1) it justifies dehumanizing adults who remain humans with their own worlds: wills, wants, emotions, feelings, dreams, identities, etc., and more sinister (2) it does this so that some day “the children” can grow and mature into cogs in the machine themselves! We value the humanity of the children but only in so far as we can anticipate that they’ll be adults one day who can be exploited.

According to Beauvoir, “The attitude of the sub-man passes logically over into that of the serious man; he forces himself to submerge his freedom in the content which the latter accepts from society. He loses himself in the object in order to annihilate his subjectivity (p. 49).”

Quick biographical detour. I was raised within a sect of Christianity known as “Oneness Pentecostalism”. My perspective is that it’s an extreme expression of religion that is unhealthy, at best, and downright harmful, at worst. When I became an adult, I left that world behind me. I’ve known people who couldn’t leave. I’ve pitied them but I know they don’t need my pity. Subjectively, who’s to say. It may be as many of them have believed over the years that I, the apostate, need pity. But since I’m writing, let me share another quote from Beauvoir that reminded me of what I had seen time and time again as my contemporaries in my 20s realized all the problems with the Oneness Pentecostal subculture but chose to remain (p. 50):

“Often the young man, who has not, like the sub-man, first rejected existence, so that these questions are not even raised, is nevertheless frightened to answer them. After a more or less long crisis, either he turns back toward the world of his parents and his teachers or he adheres to the values which are new but seem to him just as sure. Instead of assuming an affectivity which would throw him dangerously beyond himself, he represses it.”

This must seem perverse to anyone unfamiliar with the subculture that I’m referencing but I remember being filled with fear when I realized that I didn’t think that I believed much of what I had been taught about things ranging from eternal judgment to how one becomes a “real” Christian (speaking in tongues as the outward evidence of salvation) to how one must appear on the outside (dress and grooming) to be “holy”. I wondered whether I was “backsliding” toward future eternal damnation.

Once this fear had been overcome though, it was freeing. It was freeing to choose to shape my own understanding of Christianity, which has evolved endlessly all the way up to this point in my life. But I knew people who chose to stay in the safety of their small religious communities because they couldn’t risk the “what if”. They worried that they had been taught “the truth,” as you’ll often hear it called in those circles: “the full gospel”. They turned back to the world that they knew; they repressed their doubts.

The serious man “dedicates his life staunchly to one particular cause, ideology, or set of values that he considers to be good,” as Hekker phrased it. For many of my fellow educators, for many of my former co-religionists, what was used once to demoralize us into accepting our condition (making us sub-people) makes us vulnerable to adopting the ideology so that we can recover ready-made meaning. About this person, Beauvoir says that “he is no longer a man, but a father, a boss, a member of the Christian Church or the Communist Party (p. 52).” Once we have forsaken our identity as individuals who might change and evolve over time, open to what freedom may offer us, we become the “serious man”. This can be dangerous, as Beauvoir reminds us (p. 53):

“The serious leads to a fanaticism which is as formidable as the fanaticism of passion. It is a fanaticism of the Inquisition which does not hesitate to impose a credo, that is, an internal movement, by means of external constraints. It is a fanaticism of the Vigilantes of America who defend morality by means of lynchings. It is the political fanaticism which empties politics of all human content and imposes the State, not for individuals, but against them.”

This may seem dramatic but I’ve watched as underground fantasies of capturing the world “for Christ” have emerged to become legitimate threats to democracy. The Pentecostals who raised me have no problem with Christian Nationalism, or more accurately, Christian Fascism: Google “New Apostolic Reformation” to see what I mean. The educator who has given up on self-advocacy “for the children” may not turn into an extremist but they’ll judge their colleagues who aim for work-life balance, who don’t spend a bunch of their own money funding things that their schools won’t, etc. In doing so, they’re at least agreeing with the “Cause” that the problem isn’t systemic or institutional; the problem is with the teacher.

(I say this as a teacher who works hard. I arrive early to my job. I do find myself irritated by colleagues who seem laissez-faire about their vocations, who seem to lack work ethic. I don’t think I’ve crossed the line yet into reproducing the manipulative, anti-worker language that I see floating around the edu-sphere but I’m aware that my temptation is less “quiet quitting” and more “joining ‘the Cause'”. I’m definitely self-critiquing here as my identity is tied to my job in such a way that I must put effort into leaving work at work.)

Beauvoir understands that sometimes we can’t escape becoming “serious”. There are social factors and demands of all kinds (think keeping a paycheck to pay the bills or to feed your own kids) that lead people to remain in situations that they know aren’t ideal. She writes, “…certain adults can live in the universe of the serious in all honestly, for example, those who are denied instruments of escape, those who are enslaved or who are mystified. The less economic and social circumstances allow an individual to act upon the world, the more this world appears to him as given (p. 51).” I think of people who I know who became clergy, not only in Oneness Pentecostalism but within Evangelicalism. As they aged their views changed. They didn’t believe themselves the “statement of faith” on their church’s website. But to say this out loud would mean the termination of their employment. What do they do then? The fear of loss is great: lost status, a lost paycheck, a loss of community. These are real losses. Some realize that they’re down life’s journey too far to reinvent themselves now, so they self-justify in order to stay where they’re at. They preach from a pulpit every Sunday doctrines that they haven’t believed in years. I don’t judge this. It may not be wrong in a sense. They are serving their community in some way through this inauthenticity. And let’s be honest: all of us must do this to some degree to live in our world with others. The real question is how much inauthenticity is worth it to keep what you have?