Assholes (13 page)

In the present context, such feminist critiques come to the aid of maleness. It is not the maleness of males per se that explains the proliferation of masculine assholes. It is not that
men
are assholes, as though non-asshole men have somehow
overcome
their inherently male asshole tendencies. Rather, the influence of gender culture is just very deep. Deep gender culture, not maleness, is primarily to blame for the fact that assholes are mainly men.
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Without pretending to settle the deep question of asshole causation, let us assume for the sake of argument that culture can make people into assholes. Since culture varies widely, we should expect this to work differently across different times and places (even if nearly universal patriarchy sets some general constraints). This in turn poses the question, Do some societies tend to produce assholes in larger numbers relative to the general population than other societies relative to theirs? Are there more assholes per capita in the United States than in Japan, or in Italy than in Finland? Or does every society have
roughly the same percentage of assholes in its population and asshole behavior is merely expressed differently according to different prevailing social norms? If we answer that asshole to non-asshole ratios can vary from place to place, we might also wonder about change over time: Are there more assholes than there used to be in the United States as compared to a control group such as Canada, or in Brazil as compared to a control group such as Argentina or Peru?

The answer to all these questions is, It sure seems so, at least from the casual-traveler anthropologist’s point of view. Not only do some societies, such as the United States or Italy or Brazil, seem to produce many more assholes than other societies, but each seems to have more assholes than it used to. Maybe societies such as South Africa have fewer assholes in the wake of the apartheid years. If we look at global trends, though, asshole production seems to be on the rise.

One could argue that asshole production proceeds at a uniform and steady rate and that there has merely been an increase in asshole
reporting
, with increasing media scrutiny of public figures and profit-driven exposure of assholes on TV, in print, and on the Web. At the same time, however, increasing reportage also
creates
powerful incentives for assholes to bare themselves in public, for a large audience. That could itself cause asshole production to rise on average.

Here much depends on how we should interpret cultural difference. We might recall cross-cultural variation in what counts as rude behavior, as in familiar East-West contrasts. This makes it hard to tell who is or who is not an asshole. Many Asian cultures regard loud talking in public as a mark of self-centeredness and attention seeking. The South Korean asshole who visits the United States, where self-expression rather than modesty is generally
prized, would have to be especially loud to stand out. On the other hand, in a South Korean university, a visiting American student who is used to being encouraged to speak up in class could easily be mistaken for an asshole if he hadn’t yet noticed that interrupting a professor in lecture is seen as disrespectful. The confusion can persist in perceptions of whole cultures. In a developing South Asian nation such as Indonesia, it is hard for the American or British traveler not to feel that the country is overrun with assholes, given that queuing at the airport (or on the airplane) seems so much like a scrum. It takes a while to see that there is in fact a semblance of order: one is to be as pushy as possible about relative line position without simply pushing others out of the way. (Indonesians don’t share the American or British allergy to actually touching other people.) And there is no clear sign of asshole overproduction among the Indonesian people more generally. If anything, Indonesia underperforms in this way.

Given such cultural differences, one might be skeptical about whether there is any statistically significant cross-cultural or cross-temporal variation in how many assholes are getting produced. The issue is finally one for anthropologists and sociologists to settle. Still, to at least suggest why the steady state view might be wrong, why there might be real variation in asshole production, we might offer anecdotal evidence and a bit of theoretical speculation.

First the anecdotal evidence, from a kind of transnational association. Traveling Brazilian surfers, so almost everyone agrees, are much more likely to be assholes than surfers from almost anywhere else. Acting like an asshole is plainly encouraged in the subculture of Brazilian surfers, who tend to travel in large packs (e.g., of five or ten people as compared to the usual one or two or three). This probably reflects the aggressive manliness
of larger Brazilian culture but also has a more salient and direct explanation in the relatively recent past. When Brazilians first started showing up on Oahu’s famous North Shore, they were antagonized by local Hawaiians, despite mainly lying low. Hawaiian surfers had already become defensive about white visiting surfers from California, Australia, and South Africa and were especially sore about the bombastic Aussies who began to dominate in surf contests and brag loudly about it. White surfers seemed to be continuing a neocolonial expropriation of the last thing the islanders had left—they at least still ruled the world-class surf breaks.
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The brown-skinned Brazilians didn’t quite fit into the “hoale” mold, coming a bit too close for comfort to the local style. But after many sound beatings and much damage to surfboards, Brazilians learned both to fight and to travel in large, protective groups. This worked well. So well that they now regularly take the same aggressive ethos to surf breaks around the world. They trash otherwise mellow and joyous surf lineups in Tahiti or Indonesia in any number of ways: they show up all at the same time, shifting the lineup into a hypercompetitive mode; they break or cheat the rules of position and right-of-way; they threaten to “take it to the beach” when complaints are made; and they do indeed get into a fair number of fights.

That is an example of how a culture can create assholes that might not otherwise exist. We can now offer a more theoretical speculation about how this could happen on a larger societal scale. Perhaps “collectivist” cultures are less likely to engender or tolerate the required sense of entitlement than are “individualist” ones. Consider some individualistic political philosophies. Whether widely avowed or simply in the air, some have a clear
entitlement message that may push many mere would-be assholes over the line. The would-be asshole might embrace the philosophy he is already inclined toward and take succor in the fact that some seemingly smart or respected people agree. That may cement his self-confidence during his tender years, leaving him with the easier task of noting how many fools fail to grasp what any sufficiently intelligent and truly worthy person would readily see. Yet were the very same child reared in a culture in which deference and cooperation are seen as all-important, his sense of entitlement would never have developed or been suppressed, and he would never have become the asshole he now is.

So, for example, given that the United States seems to have more than its share of assholes, it would be interesting to know how many impressionable young Americans read Ayn Rand’s Objectivism-soaked novels and how those numbers compare in Japan, where assholes seem comparatively rare. We might also compare the effects of self-esteem-boosting parenting and Internet social networking, which are increasingly making narcissism a sociocultural disease, and may explain the precipitous drop in empathy among college students (especially after the year 2000, after social networking caught on).
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Without strong collectivist counterpressures, it would be surprising
not
to see a spike in the asshole population.

Assholes, then, are made and not born. They are made by a society’s gender culture. A newborn boy in the United States or Italy
or Israel is much more likely to live the life of an asshole than a newborn boy in Japan or Norway or Canada. This brings us back to the disquieting possibility that assholes are morally not to blame for their condition. Responsibility for what the asshole does may lie with the culture that made him rather than with the asshole himself. Our discussion has been founded on the assumption that we rightly feel not simply bothered or annoyed but
indignant
or
resentful
about how the asshole treats us. It is now time to take seriously the possibility that this assumption is wrong. While the asshole of course makes a huge mess of things, it may well be that, ultimately, his hands are morally clean: he is foul but not to blame.

Why take this possibility seriously? Here is a serious philosophical argument for the skeptical view that assholes are not morally responsible. According to the argument, reactions of indignation, resentment, or any other form of blame will be appropriate only if the asshole is responsible for what he does. More specifically, the asshole will be responsible for what he does only if or to the extent that what he does is
fully within his control
. But, in general, the asshole is not fully in control of what he does. What he does simply reflects who he is, where who he is mainly reflects the culture into which he is born and raised; where that is, of course, is something over which he has little or no control. Hence, the asshole is not responsible for what he does and so is not the appropriate object of indignation, resentment, or any other form of blame.

The intuitive idea can be framed in terms of luck. Plenty of people manage not to become assholes. This is mainly good luck for them; it happens because of all kinds of factors that were beyond their control (e.g., being born into the right family). Likewise, anyone who becomes an asshole suffers a major stroke of bad luck, which could have easily gone the other way. A
given American asshole, say, would most likely not have become an asshole had he been born and raised just across the border in Canada. It is an unfortunate fact of life that he is an asshole, for him and for us, but he can hardly be blamed for being born on the wrong side of a border.

The problem becomes more difficult when we recall that assholes rarely if ever fundamentally change. That is not to say they
cannot
change—a few, after all, do see the moral light. But it might seem unreasonable to
expect
them to change. It might be that we should see being an asshole as a kind of culturally induced mental handicap that society must simply accommodate and accept. Indeed, if society is chiefly responsible for the asshole’s plight, it may seem
especially
unfair that it consigns so many people to a condition from which there is only a slim chance of escape. The appropriate response to the asshole is not then indignation or resentment but sympathy—sympathy for a fellow person who is locked inside an egocentric cage.

While sympathy is a good quality, this is hard to swallow. No one, after all, is forcing the asshole to speak too loudly or abuse his position of power. He does these things of his own free will, of his own accord. Is he not then rightly to blame? Perhaps. But the question then is what exactly this “freedom of will” consists of. We haven’t defended our right to place blame until we’ve said what that could possibly mean.

Here, then, is one traditional answer: assholes do indeed have full control over their actions, and they are properly blamed for how they choose to exercise it. You are to blame for killing someone with your car when you could have swerved out of the way or could have had your brakes checked. You are not to blame if the accident resulted from a car pileup that was
entirely out of your control. You had, or lacked, “full control” over those outcomes, in the sense required for you to count as morally responsible for them.

This view feels natural but also courts skepticism about moral responsibility in its own way. The assumption is still that the asshole is responsible for what he does
only if
what he does is fully in his control. But in what sense is anyone ever
fully
in control of what one does? The answer depends on what “fully” means. When the asshole speaks too loudly, he acts in character; he acts from the entrenched sense of entitlement that defines who he is. But, it may seem, the asshole is
fully
in control of his speaking too loudly only if he is
also
fully in control of his becoming that kind of person. Yet is any asshole really
fully in control of his having become an asshole
? Can we really say that every asshole we want to blame has somehow freely chosen his characterological fate from a position of full control over who he would finally become? This seems a stretch. Again, culture has a huge role. The cultural crosscurrents that drew a given asshole into his condition needn’t have
determined
his fate in order to have deprived him of “full control” over who he has in fact become. He could have simply been going with the cultural flow like almost everyone else. Maybe he even shaped his own process of development. Still, that won’t amount to his having had “full control” over the outcome. Who one becomes is generally not in one’s control in the way it is in my control, say, whether or not I raise my arm (with no one holding it down, etc.).
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To press the point, we can ask: When would this free choice from a position of full control supposedly have occurred? Many assholes are teenagers who never grew up. But a
teenager
can hardly be said to have at some point stepped out of his egocentric predicament and cast a free vote in favor of staying or becoming an asshole instead of developing into a fully cooperative adult. More likely, the thought of doing things differently just didn’t occur to him. He went in the direction of defensiveness instead of personal growth mainly because this seemed to work out pretty well for him. He mostly got what he wanted out of this. Perhaps his surrounding culture didn’t send him strong competing messages, or even ushered him along the asshole’s path.