Only God can judge Kanye West: refusing the spectacle of judgement and judgement of the spectacle

I. Mental illness generally

We must not excuse Kanye West’s behavior with mental illness! So say the pundits:

Before we even get onto Kayne specifically, one thing I can say for sure that I’m sick of reading “mental illness doesn’t do that”. Freddie de Boer has rightly identified and attacked this meme, but I have a somewhat different, though ultimately concurring view I want to outline in this piece.

Mental illness has raised empires and destroyed them, mental illness has made people kill their own children and made them die for them, sometimes at the same time. Mental illness has made, in part, The Brothers Karamazov and the Time Cube website. Mental illness has made people constantly violent, and it has made people so determined in their anti-violence that they will not leave their house for fear of hurting a person or insect. ‘Mental illness’ isn’t a thing. There’s just different specific conditions, and even to treat them as specific, individual conditions maybe reifies it too much. There is nothing mental illness cannot do- the right (wrong) mental illness in combination with the right (wrong) person- except, perhaps, make a happy and healthy person.

‘Mental illness’, in combination with cancerous seams of antisemitism in our society, can absolutely make you rant about how the Jews are controlling the world. That one’s not even particularly uncommon. Is that what’s happened in Kanye’s case? I don’t know, probably no one does. We must unequivocally condemn Kanye’s statements, but that doesn’t mean we have to pretend we understand the relationship between Kanye- the complex human being- and these statements.

Part of the problem is that that the only public faces of mental illness have become people with depression and anxiety, often, but not always, mild depression and anxiety. These are the photogenic case studies. To be absolutely clear, this is not to say that depression and anxiety are inherently mild. Both can leave a person bedridden. Nor is it to trivialize the pain of mild depression- I’ve had ‘mild’ depression in addition to my other mental illnesses, and if I hadn’t had severe OCD, it would probably have been the worst thing that ever happened to me. But it isn’t the whole of mental illness.

I don’t like ranking disability, I don’t like creating hierarchies of ‘privilege’ and ‘oppression’, but in this case, there is no choice. People with relatively mild conditions are representing to the world what mental illness is, and that’s a problem. Actually ‘beating the stigma’ if such a thing were possible, would involve people publicly talking about psychosis, or worrying they were going to kill their own kids, or whatever else and meeting acceptance when they explained these experiences.

I know a woman who attacked a store full of people with an axe due, in large part, to mental illness. Fortunately no one died, several came close. When there was talk about it on Facebook, among people who knew her second hand, the very same people who changed their Facebook profile pictures to RUOK day images were silent about it.

One often hears people say “the mentally ill are much more likely to be subject to violence that to perpetrate it.” True, true, but 1) this doesn’t mean mental illness never leads to violence and 2) actually giving a damn about mentally ill people means your care and support for them not contingent on this factoid. Even if mentally ill people were violent all the time, you should still want to help them get better and support them.

II. Kanye West and the measure of a man

One of the better arguments I’ve seen that we should judge West harshly is that he’s been saying similar edgy stuff for years. So goes the argument, that shows that latest outburst can’t just be due to a manic episode- it must reflect his underlying beliefs.

I’m not at all sure about that. We don’t know how reliably Kayne has been taking his meds. We don’t know how well-controlled his bipolar disorder is in general. We don’t even know his full diagnosis and comorbidities. I think that saying we can separate out his non-manic, non-depressive episodes from the rest of his behavior is speculative- I’ve never even met the guy! More controversially, I think that even during non-manic, non-depressive periods, his mental illness still influences him in various ways. Let me give an example. Suppose I say awful, rightwing things while I’m having a manic episode. As a result, no left-wingers or liberals want to speak with me, but right-wingers will. It’s only natural, though not admirable, that this will push me to the right of politics- throw in a big dose of that, plus some mania, and my guess is you’ve got an outline of what’s happened to Kanye.

So is Kayne West a victim or a preparator. Good or bad?

I would suggest that Kayne West is just a guy doing things for reasons. Biological reasons, social reasons, motivational reasons, all sorts of reasons, myriad reasons for each action. Some of those actions are immoral, in the sense that they’re harmful. What Kanye West is not is a hypothetical goat or sheep for us to sort to heaven or hell. Whether he is a bad person, whether this actions reflect his true agency or true beliefs, whether they flow from his deep moral core and whether they show that core to be good or evil- those aren’t the most important questions. What we can do to help, to ameliorate, to heal, to protect- those are the important questions. This is where I perhaps disagree a little with de Boer, he thinks that it’s important in our moral assessments that we neither ignore mental illness, nor use it as an excuse-all.My view is that we need to cut back on moral assessments of people altogether.

Of course at this distance, we can’t really do anything to help or ameliorate, let alone heal or protect. The only actions available to us is to excoriate or praise. That’s why moral discourse has become moralistic discourse. In this spectacle we live in, giving a verdict, aesthetic or moral, is the only action available. Hence we keep banging the gavel of judgement.

We’re caught in a spectacle where we thinking rendering judgements on things is a substitute for real action, social action with groups of people to change the world. Like someone who sticks pins in a voodoo doll, we’re caught making magical substitutes for real actions. Our words become so violent precisely because they are so powerless. Our words become so violent precisely because they are so powerless.

No one knows how much Kayne’s action reflect Kayne’s “true-self” underlying, beneath or behind the mental illness. I don’t even know if this question makes sense.

I am uncertain on all the facts- both the specific facts of Kayne’s case and his life and the complex realities of Bipolar disorder and neuroscience which no one understands even close to completely.

I’m also uncertain on the metaphysics, the ontology of freedom, responsibility and personhood and the philosophy of medicine- how do we distinguish deviance from illness?

Finally, I’m uncertain on the ethics- of evil, of personal evaluation. How we should evaluate. When should we evaluate. What does it mean to be appropriately in control of one’s actions to such a degree that one can be blamed for them? I don’t know. No one knows. This is one of the reasons why the phrase ‘only God can judge me’ is one of the most popular tattoos out there.

III. Boycott judgement

So what if we stopped making judgements of good or bad about people. What if we were called upon to stamp someone good or bad and we refused? What if we all received a jury summons for the trial of humanity and no one came?

I’m just not that interested in whether a successful insanity defense can be mounted for Kayne West, whether we accept it as a mitigating factor, or whether we reject it entirely. I’d rather talk about other things like the history of antisemitism, the cruelty of the concept and institution of celebrity, these and many other topics.

Seriously, stop and think about it for a moment. What if, all across the discourse, we refused to keep making good/bad judgements? What if we instead became invested in more positive questions about the human psyche, and left our normative theorizing to questions like ‘how can I help’ rather than, ‘is he good or bad’? Can you imagine it? In my minds eye that kingdom of ends looks like it is at least drifting towards utopia precisely because it looks like it is on the verge of walking away from discourse and actually doing something.

I realize that what I’m talking about here won’t work- at least not if turned into an absolute principle. I’ve got to admit I make these evaluations sometimes. Good/bad evaluations are functional. They do useful things for us. It’s not an accident of history that we make these evaluations. But even if they’re sometimes useful, making these judgements doesn’t have to be front and center in your interactions, in your writing, in your reading.

Recognize the moral evaluation of persons as a flawed, though useful practice and stop clinging to it. Avoid assessing people’s character were you can avoid it. When you are forced to make these assessments, focus on a much more complex interlocking picture of light and shade, freedom and necessity, person and environment, rather than a unidimensional ‘good’ or ‘bad’ verdict.

Let me give a model of this sort of thing in Leonard Cohen’s picture of David in “Halleluiah”. This is a character who murdered the husband of a woman he desired in order to have her to himself. The song doesn’t shy away from the awfulness of this act:

Well, maybe there's a God above
But all I've ever learned from love
Is how to shoot somebody who outdrew ya

But the song invites us to engage much more deeply than this with David. It invites us to evaluate his life, his story morally, cosmically, individually, interpersonally, not to render a single judgement but to study the tangled weave of moral action and life in all its glory and horror. E.g.

Your faith was strong but you needed proof
You saw her bathing on the roof
Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew her
She tied you to a kitchen chair
She broke your throne, and she cut your hair

….

But it's not a crime that you're hear tonight
It's not some pilgrim who claims to have seen the Light
No, it's a cold and it's a very broken Hallelujah

…

Now I've done my best, I know it wasn't much
I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch
I've told the truth, I didnt come here to London just to fool you
And even though it all went wrong
I'll stand right here before the Lord of song

That’s how you should approach people. Particularly people you don’t know personally. Particularly people whose lives intersect with tragedies such as mental illness in a way that makes praise and blame difficult to assign. Understanding should come before judgement- perhaps in a better world it would replace it.