What are we missing?

I’m probably wrong about the big-deal novel I’m not going to write about—it’s been praised up and down by people I respect and the jacket blurbs are attached to names not often seen in log-rolling circles. It will be featured in book clubs. It will probably win some big awards. (And be made into a movie that I’ll probably think is better than the book.) It just sort of made me angry.

Obviously there are smart folks who see something in this book I don’t. And since there are so many worthy books out there starving for attention, the world doesn’t need me to put to pixel font the takedown I’ve constructed in my head. That might be entertaining, but the truth is I’m not that confident about my opinion. And if I ever met the author I’m not sure I could justify the cruelty she would surely perceive in my review.

Not that I will ever run into her, but you’d be surprised. I once had a famous (in architecture circles) acolyte of Frank Lloyd Wright challenge me over an opinion I expressed about his idol’s famously complicated private life. “Were you there?” he thundered. I had to admit I wasn’t, though he wasn’t either, and Wright often bemoaned that though it was “infinitely more difficult to live without rules” that’s what a “really honest, sincere thinking man” such as himself was “compelled to do.”

While I didn’t feel bad about sharing my opinions about Wright, I was taken aback when a rock star’s sister accused me of being hurtful when I wrote flippantly about her brother’s troubles. And when a famous film director’s mother let me know that she did not appreciate what I’d written about her son’s work, I didn’t significantly realign my opinion of it, but I understood why she felt as she did. The deeper you mean to connect with your audience—your constituency, your base—the more you have to risk losing the attention (or engendering the animosity) of casual observers who, for whatever reason, don’t relate to your work.

So while it’s fair to comment on any work proffered for public consumption, we should all understand that there will be things about art that elude us. I’m willing to entertain the notion that there’s something deeper to this book I simply don’t perceive. And since I’m not compelled to write about it, I shouldn’t—I’d probably just be advertising my own stupidity.

Sometimes we just don’t get things. I watched about half an hour of Game of Thrones before switching it off in the middle of the first of what I assume were thousands of torture scenes. Not that I couldn’t take it, I just didn’t want to—and I’m certain I’ve missed out on a rich experience. It’s easy to tease GOT fans (and I do), but diving deep into an alternative universe is something most of us can understand, whether we escape to Yoknapatawpha County, Stay More, Narnia or the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

I’m not saying they are all the same, but the impulse that propels us to explore the apocryphal territories may well be.

I understand why people play fantasy (what we used to call “rotisserie”) baseball and why they geek out over Star Wars or Star Trek. Part of it is that it’s simply fun to know stuff and to discuss esoteric topics. It also provides you with a cohort with which you can identify. It feels good to be on a team, to wear colors and recognize fellow travelers in random situations. A stranger notes my Jason Isbell baseball cap at a coffee shop, and we connect for a moment. I lift my hand off my steering wheel to salute a woman with the good sense to drive the same make of car I do.

And sure, I secretly sneer at some choices. People who do this or that really are the worst. I judge people all the time based on what they wear or the music they like. But only until I learn something else about them, only until they inevitably reveal themselves as human.

Brand tribalism is rampant in the world we’ve made. Not just in the Coke vs. Pepsi arena of commercial advertising, but in the red/blue dichotomy that has infested our politics. I remember when it was possible to tease someone about their political affiliations. Now everything is cast as a Manichean struggle between good and evil, with nothing more or less than the soul of the nation at stake. A more realistic way to look at the current administration is as the natural backlash to the one before it, and what comes next will likely be an over-reaction to Trumpism. Which means that while the current coalition of the aggrieved will not long hold, we can hardly expect it to be succeeded by a bloc of the reasonable.

Mainly we’ll see that which has been done be partially undone. Though every administration has its residual effects, which show up most prominently in the courts, Martin Luther King Jr. may have been right when he paraphrased 19th-century abolitionist Theodore Parker and alleged that “the moral arc of the universe . . . bends toward justice.”

That’s a wonderful thought, beautifully expressed, but I’m not at all sure it’s true. I’m not at all sure that the universe has a moral arc to bend, and if it does it oscillates back and forth, whiplashing between whatever absolute poles may exist. Cheaters tend to prosper, if they’re careful. To pretend otherwise is to deny the gray evidence that accumulates daily in our news feeds and personal experience.

That doesn’t mean there’s no incentive for most of us to try to do good. There’s a lot of pressure on us to abide by societal norms. Less cynically, it’s easier for most of us to sleep when we pay our bills and meet our obligations; we might enjoy the idea of ourselves as good people. While there are obvious exceptions, the idea of contributing something to the world drives a lot of us—we understand that unselfishness can be its own reward.

As Nick Carraway’s father said in The Great Gatsby, “All the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.” You don’t develop empathy without having known love. You don’t develop taste without exposure.

If you’re angry, the first thing to do is consider what you may be missing.

Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.