My grad school mentor, Gene Franklin, used to use an expression, “With malice aforethought,” to express an analysis trick he was about to show the class which would seem odd to the uninitiated, but would become obvious later. The expression is a legal term for premeditation, but with Gene’s smooth Southern accent, it always sounded like “With malice and forethought,” which probably would mean about the same thing. Of course, Gene was one of the most diplomatic people I have ever known, and the idea of anyone associating him with malice is pretty absurd. He always said it with a whimsical smile, as if to gently lead us down his premeditated explanation. In his usage, the expression was used to mean, “Trust me. I’ve thought about this.”
As what would have been his 90th birthday has just passed, I was thinking about him. I have one of his books on my floor destined for a first year Stanford EE grad student. One of his greatest lessons to me was to recognize that things that can seem vastly different are often different views of the same problem. “If it walks like a duck,” so to speak. The underlying lesson was not to get wrapped up in the different views, but to find the common problem they were trying to describe. Sorry, I’m digressing.
“With malice a(nd)forethought” comes to mind these days because watching the machinations of angry, irrational, yelling people (whether they be the Trump Administration, Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, extreme left anarchists, jihadist mullahs, or Confederate flag waving alt-right white supremacists – whether they have a robe or not), I see a lot of malice, but not a lot of forethought. They rant, they get people angry, they complain about things that are wrong (real, perceived, or made up), but at no point do they have any workable solutions.
Instead, they have slogans, saying, a word salad of nonsense, sometimes harkening back to some mythical time when things were “so much better”. The truth is that things might have been so much better for one (usually small) part of the population, but if you take everyone in the country into account, it’s most likely that things were not better back then.
Yes, citizens of Ancient Athens had full democracy, but only males. The female half of the population could not vote, and neither could the half of the population that were slaves and foreigners. Thus, this flower of democracy was for only ¼ of the population. (https://www.pbs.org/empires/thegreeks/educational/lesson1.html).
People can be nostalgic about the age of chivalry, but being a knight was not available to 98% of the population. It certainly wasn’t available to women. (Forget Brienne of Tarth, they had not invented Game of Thrones back then.) Not available to the poor serfs, not available to pretty much anyone but a select few. Of course, nobody writes about the misery of the common person for entertainment purposes, so the stories that remain are those of King Arthur, Ivanhoe, Robin Hood, or Don Quixote. Even these folks were lucky to have any books (except for Quixote who had too many low-quality books). There was no radio, TV, Internet, public libraries, minimal science, medicine, and education. Even for the luckiest people back then, life sucked compared to what average folks have now.
And so, the problems of today cannot be solved with a time machine that takes us back to the past, because getting there, we would realize that the past was lame. To be sure, there are principles and lessons from the past that we can bring forward to the present day and we should do this, but as for turning back the clock, not so much.
And yet, there is so much malice towards other people from these groups, so much hatred, so much vilification. I can tell you in the 1970s I was young and stupid (I am no longer young) and I had very young and stupid views about what is now known as the LBGTQ community. Like the kids around me, I used words and repeated jokes that would embarrass the hell out of me if I remembered them accurately. I guess forgetting specifics over time is helpful. I guess I have done better as more than one friend from my grade school days have come out to me privately, trusting me with information that they would rather not be public.
My point is that over the years, I learned that what I “knew” back then was nonsense. In 1984, I ran my first “Bay to Breakers” across San Francisco. (It was a lot more fun back then since they didn’t try to sanitize it as much.) 80,000+ people started at the Embarcadero (the Bay) and ran across town on the third Sunday in May to get to Golden Gate Park and the Pacific Ocean (the Breakers). I ran with another first year grad student from the trailer next door (different story). At some point, we turned down a street and there were all these guys dressed in leather (more like half dressed). “Where the heck?” “Oh, Castro Street.” It was kind of freaky, and then it hit me that they were … just watching the race. How they dressed was their version of “you do you” and that was it. Farther in, we got to the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park, and there was a black dude there with a Styrofoam cooler full of crushed ice for folks to grab in one hand, and his other hand held up to High-Five everyone he could. You do you. A few hundred yards further (remember this is before 9 am on a Sunday morning), a woman was sitting there in full body black skin-tight leather, red spike heels, dog collar, flame red hair. She was … just watching the race. We came down the hill through the pine trees and picked up the smell of the ocean. Turned left at the windmill and sprinted down the Great Highway towards the finish. The race was a high point in an otherwise miserable year, but more than the race, those people have stuck with me.
I started seeing different just as different, not bad. You do you. Live and let live. Enjoy life. Appreciate that others might enjoy it differently, but that’s no sweat off your back. After that, when issues of differences and inclusion came up, the general thought was “Why should you care?” (i.e. Why should you oppose it?) if folks different from you get the same protections you have lived with all your life. Don’t blame me for the past, don’t take away my rights, but hey, you do you. You should have that right. With enough forethought, I felt a lot less threatened. I felt a lot less malice.
Years later, my then 4th grader asked me about a California Ballot Proposition, Prop. 8, to ban same sex marriage. “What’s the deal with same sex marriage?” “Well,” I began, “When folks get older, they often want to get together with someone. About 90% of the time, men want to get together with women, and women want to get together with men. About 10% of the time, women want to get together with women and men want to get together with men. I might have the percentages off.” I wish I could have captured the dumbfounded look on his face as he asked, “That’s it?!?” “Yeah, pretty much.” He cared as much about same sex marriage then as he cared about opposite sex marriage, which was to say, not at all. Done and done. A bit of forethought; no malice.
What we are watching today is a lot of malice from people who feel threatened. They feel their status, their level of life threatened. The world is changing (march of technology, climate change, globalization) and so it is not irrational for all of us to feel a little bit threatened. However, this group has been told by political con artists not to think, not to apply forethought. All they need is malice. Malice towards those who are different. Malice towards folks that used to be on the margins of society because of who they were born as, not because of anything evil that they chose. Malice toward the present time. “Let’s take ourselves back to when it was less confusing. Let’s go back to when everyone knew their place. Let’s restore the caliphate. Let’s make America great again.” All slogans, all pointing to sanitized picture of an earlier time.
The people who lead them down these angry paths are con artists, be they the mullahs, the Imperial Wizards, or the majority leaders in Congress. They know what they are doing, and they have the full malice aforethought that the expression means. The people who follow them, though, who believe the con, have captured all the emotion of the malice, but not the analysis of the forethought.
I don’t have answers, but one thing that changes people is realizing that you have the wrong mental image of something, someone, some event, or some period of time. Some people just watching the race changed my view of a lot of people.
As Mark Twain wrote, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”
We cannot visit the past, but we can learn about it and I think that one thing we need to do is get better mental images of what the past was really like, not just for one small group of people, but for most of the people around them. Getting better images of the past will allow us to have better forethought about other people, about the future. And ironically, with better forethought comes a lot less malice.