The Forest for the Trees
Perspective-taking is one of the most useful methods of practicing empathy and awareness, yet it is not something people often practice. When in the thick of things, people tend to focus only on the things immediately relevant to them—consider it a different practice of filtering out disquieting or overwhelming stimuli. In narrowing our awareness, constructing our personal worlds, we can become blind to things that are salient.
It’s not unusual to be presented with information that reaches beyond or is derived from outside our own little worlds. If a friend tells you about what they did over summer, you’re getting insight into something outside your scope. Maybe the information is novel in a positive way and your interest is piqued, or maybe it’s novel in a neutral or negative way and your interest is unmoved or diminished. Oftentimes I, myself listen to details of someone else’s life and, after hearing nothing of interest (to me), I pick out the pieces that I personally relate to and make a generic response to those. For example, a friend once described getting some niche version of coffee to see what it was like and the barista had spelled their name wrong on the cup, and I, being someone who doesn’t drink coffee nor remotely have interest in modern society’s culture surrounding coffee, responded, “People, am I right?” Maybe the friend wanted my input or expressed interest of what they thought of the niche coffee they had ordered, but that was a topic of their world I was disinterested in; in my world, having a name misspelled or mispronounced (seriously, imagine how many times this happens to someone named “Torion Oey”) is relatable and thus piquing my interest.
Speaking of differing interests, there can be an extreme occurrence in which people have what can be considered parallel conversations. That is, two or more people can talk together about related things without relation to the other people.
“Oh, Johnny dearest got a raise at work this week!”
“I’m so glad my dear Kenny found a job after he was laid off.”
“My husband got sacked.”
“I got a new sack for my youngest for school!”
Such conversations aren’t really responding to another person, but rather to the topic the other person brings up, in this case jobs. They can also be fairly tangential, as shown by the last person’s input only being related by the word “sack.” I consider this way of talking in parallel as involving a series of springboards people touch down on briefly before launching themselves off into an unconnected area.
Anyway, that bit about parallel conversations was sort of a tangent itself. The main takeaway was that people tend to have limited awareness that favors particularizing something that may cause them to miss something else. You could say they can’t see the forest for the trees. Perhaps this is not merely obliviousness or short-sightedness; it could be the obstinance or avoidance of those who defy the idea that they could be wrong about something; it may be the conceit of those who pride themselves on what they know; or it can be all of the above alongside a dash of pedantry and contrarianism. Whatever the motive, I mainly wanted to rant about this phenomenon of limited awareness in the context of exceptions, humor, and art.
Exceptions refer to things that are excluded from a general statement or that don’t follow a rule. For instance, there is a social rule (norm) that imports that you should hold the door open for anybody behind you; an exception to this rule would be if you lacked arms. How does this relate to failing to see the bigger picture? Well, consider efforts to make sense of or productively use general information in conversation that receive an interjection of an exception.
Person A: “I’ve been wondering what sorts of treats I could give my dog.”
Person B: “You should try giving your dog apples! A lot of dogs like apples.”
Person C: “That’s wrong because my dog doesn’t like apples.”
There are times in which taking into account exceptions is fully appropriate, however in the above case it would be inappropriate due to person A’s dog not being person C’s and thus having a better chance than not to appreciate apples as a treat per person B’s general statement. Person C also makes the mistake of treating an exception as reason to dismiss the generality as wrong. It would likewise be a mistake in the aforementioned norm of holding doors open for people to rebuke the norm because of the unfortunate, odd case of someone who didn’t have arms not being able to hold doors. This is a more common mistake than you might think, taking an outlier or even a more common statistical datapoint along a distribution that does not conform exactly to what the average of the dataset is and then concluding the average (or other datapoints in the dataset) to be wrong. There are several amusing examples of this error of thinking, though I’ll stick with showcasing just one in a meme.
“There are individual exceptions now as there always have been. But, as these exceptions do not appear to increase in number, it would surely be a very unphilosophical mode of arguing to infer, merely from the existence of an exception, that the exception would, in time, become the rule, and the rule the exception.”
-Thomas Malthus
Humor is another thing people may not understand. Ah, good ol’ humor. Sometimes it lands, sometimes it doesn’t—different strokes for different folks, y’know? Like a lot of things, humor is subjective, but there is structure to the art of laughs. Punchlines, or final pieces of context in a joke, are the norm for drawing these laughs. Of course, fitting with the aforementioned topic of exceptions, not all humor needs a punchline: an example that comes to mind is the standup comedian Mitch Hedberg simply stating, “A burrito is a sleeping bag for ground beef.” It could be the unconventional metaphor or it could be the way he phrases it (or it could be something else entirely), but whatever the case people found the humor to be funny. Now, for the inevitable acknowledgement: there are some people who not only don’t understand humor (or take exception to it) but they take their own opinion of it as what’s true about the humor. These people aren’t just those who say, “I didn’t get it,” or “I didn’t find it that funny.” These people go a step further and say, “That wasn’t funny,” or even, “That wasn’t a joke.” Take the above meme, for instance; some may find the humor in it to be playing off or perpetuating a stereotype that women don’t understand generalizations or averages; depending on whether the humor landed or not, it could lead people to chuckle at it, shrug it off, or take it seriously and claim the joke is misogyny. Personally, I considered the meme to be more broadly poking fun at anyone who misunderstands averages, though I do find further ironic humor in people who respond to the meme with criticism that its use is inapplicable to particular, contrary cases (i.e., exemplifying the meme in response to the meme).
The topic of humor being hit or miss can depend on how relevant it is to a person. If I were someone else, let’s say a woman, maybe I’d find the above meme less funny, though it need not be due to mistaking the humor as personal criticism against me or my gender—maybe I simply had little-to-no experience with people who misunderstood averages. Aside from humor based around stereotypes, dark humor is another type that can draw misunderstandings. I define dark humor as humor centered around a taboo topic that typically leans in to the reason the topic is taboo in an absurd manner. An example:
“What,” I ask, “is the difference between a leper and a dead guy?”
“What?” you ask back.
I reply, “The dead guy has respect.”
That instant of realization, the horror at the circumstances of lepers being made into a joke, is where the “dark” in dark humor resides. What makes it moral (in my opinion) is that dark humor is predicated on our own morality—if we didn’t find the subject of dark humor abjectly immoral, we wouldn’t find it funny. Of course, people who’re perfectly moral also may not find the joke funny, but, again, to each their own. The mistake some may make in not seeing the forest for the trees here is when such humor evokes laughter and said laughter is interpreted as both delight in and agreement with the seriousness of the topic. Now, I’m sure there are some twisted individuals out there who may think, “Yeah, screw lepers, they don’t deserve respect, hahahahahaaaa!” But, if we’re to be realistic and take the joke in good faith, we can recognize that such people are exceptions and people who tell or laugh at such jokes are more likely than not to disagree with the seriousness of the topic while finding its abject immorality humorous.
This sort of presumptive interpretation of what others think in the context of humor is exemplary of how our own little worlds may be foisted (projected) onto the worlds of others. It often happens when subject matter hits close to home; a comedian who makes yo momma jokes may get a heckler whose mom had died—which is, indeed, sad—yet the heckler may miss or forget about the wider important context that the comedian is performing in a comedy club where comedy is the focus. These sorts of misunderstandings can be tragic, as they may occur as implicit requests to be personally understood without understanding the bigger picture (namely the perspective of the comedian as well as the others in the audience).
I think that about covers what I wanted to rant about with regards to exceptions and humor. Art has a lot of parallels with humor, both being highly subjective. That said, it is clear that there is some intention in art that intimates some manner of meaning its creator is trying to evoke. Take the poem Nothing Gold Can Stay by Robert Frost; the poem’s name pretty much sums up the poem’s meaning, and its references to the blooming and withering of nature, the fall of Eden, and the general passage of time reinforce this idea. There are plenty of other ideas that may be evoked from this core idea, and it would be silly and, again, short-sighted to insist the poem is only about the thing or things you got out of the poem. Where you may have taken away an idea of loss, I may have taken away an idea of admiration. I’ve already expounded on differences in taste, but, to briefly touch on it, like humor, poetry (and other types of art) can be hit or miss. It would also be silly to insist, beyond what it evokes, that the art itself is good or not good for everyone.
A phrase emblematic of this kind of pseudo-arbiter of art, and a phrase I’ve come to loathe, is “All art is political.” I loathe it because it’s a classic motte-and-bailey: it utilizes “political” in its most broadest sense (the easily defensible motte), and uses that to justify art being “political” only in the most narrow, partisan sense (the controversial bailey). Such myopic, ideological interpretations (i.e., eisegesis) commit both of the aforementioned silly mistakes of deciding what a work of art definitively means for everyone as well as whether the art is definitively good or bad for everyone. A recent example is interpretations of a particular character introduced in the second season of the anime WIND BREAKER. The character, Tasuku Tsubakino, is an upperclassman at the all-boys Furin High School and one of the “Four Heavenly Kings” (the main authorities at the school). He is known for having feminine attire and behaviors including wearing lipstick and being fond of fashion and other pretty things. He is also romantically attracted to Hajime Umemiya, the overall leader of the school. Despite the character being male, going to an all-boys school, and being gay (facts all of which have been referenced in the story by the character himself as well as confirmed by the mangaka), he has been interpreted to be transgender. Now, I think it’s fine to have a headcanon and interpret stories and characters the way someone personally wants, even if it’s explicitly contradicted by the source material, but to insist upon such a western ideological interpretation of this character for others to accept is where I draw the line. Ironically, this misinterpretation has drawn both positive and negative reactions from various partisan-types. Whatever the reaction, it’s annoying given what they’re reacting to and insisting upon others to believe in is fundamentally a delusion.
A final criticism I have of pseudo-arbiters of art are when they take a sanctimonious approach to insisting upon their interpretation. They’re the kind of people who scoff at another’s interpretation of art. I once saw someone on Twitter mock the general audience of Princess Mononoke for enjoying it as one of Studio Ghibli’s “quirky adventures uwu.” For one thing, this person misrepresented the general audience view of the film, as it’s commonly known as one of Studio Ghibli’s more dark and serious films. For another thing, so what if some people enjoyed it for its superficial elements and not for its underlying commentary on man and nature, morality and violence, etc., etc.? Some people seek entertainment as a form of escapism and—well, entertainment, obviously. Anyway, the person was generally misguided as their (now deleted) Tweet denigrated the audience who “misunderstood” the “true” meaning of Princess Mononoke with some additional racist diatribes, and I figured they were a good example of someone narcissistically self-absorbed and unable to look at the world beyond their own perspective.
Phew, that was quite a rant. I don’t know how to end this blog post. Uh… Oh, a relevant song that I’d recommend listening to, from what may be the best animated film ever that I’d also recommend seeing, is Through Heaven’s Eyes. On an irrelevant note, drink water.
