Thanks Isabel. This is the first time I've done this. But these are unusually rancorous times on Substack with the contesting letters about moderation or the lack thereof.
About that spelling, Hanuka is a relevant demontration. It is a Hebrew word, as is lamedvavnik. So, can there be a right spelling in English? It is, after all, a transliteration -- a phonetic spelling of a foreign language. It seems to me that there cannot be one correct way to spell it as some sounds just don't even exist in English. As a kid, I remember Chanukah as the spelling of choice but someone dropped the C. Some write it with 2 n's. I go for the simplest, which is Hanuka but spellcheck doesn't like it. Now, I don't know if the spellcheck on my laptop speaks Hebrew or is Jewish, so I just rebel and write Hanuka. So, fear not, if it sounds like the Hebrew (and yours does) it can't be wrong. So ends today's lesson in transliteration. :)
Fire Ready Aim is a common thing in many arenas of personal and professional life.. Yes, time teaches by failure that reconsideration is a mark of maturing.
Great post David, and to answer your question, yes. I have decided not to publish a post a handful of times. Usually for the reason you gave here. It only adds to the anger.
Challenging decision I would think, particularly in light of the work that went into the article you intended to release. I have been a bit torn by the debates taking place and have tried to stay on the sidelines, focusing instead on the small corner of substack where my passion resides. Thanks for sharing about that Jewish tradition. I was unfamiliar with that and found it interesting and enlightening. All the best David!
I worked in domestic violence victim services for 25 years, and I often encouraged victims to write a letter to their abuser saying everything they ever wanted to say about the harms they perpetrated and the effects of those harms. It was never the intention to send it, just to get the cathartic release from the exercise.
One victim years ago decided to read the letter to her remorseful husband (and father of their four children) during a meetup at a diner after their break up. We did safety planning around the entire encounter to make sure she was prepared for an adverse reaction from him. He cried as she read it, and so did she. When she was done, he pulled out his own letter, expressing recognition and regret for all the ways he had hurt her and by extension, the children. I don’t know if they ever reunited; I left that job soon after. And this situation is by leaps and bounds the exception rather than the rule when it comes to abusers potentially changing their stripes. But it shows that unsent letters still have great value, and that probably on occasion, some of them should indeed be sent.
I have a number of pieces which I feel passionately about, but I have not posted. It seems like they are waiting for an event to trigger their significance. (I had a post on Telemachus that sat in limbo forever until I read someone's very personal piece about his divorce. I felt like a bird called from across the river and I my piece served as a refrain.) I have been reading the responses to Nazis/free speech issue just like everyone else, but I have not responded despite having my own opinions. Your post, which I greatly appreciate, hinges on the definition of "censorship" and I guess my quibble would be that it is not the most precise word for what you are describing. Rather, I think you are exercising what I, as a Catholic, would call Prudence. From Wikipedia: Prudence (Latin: prudentia, contracted from providentia meaning "seeing ahead, sagacity") is the ability to govern and discipline oneself by the use of reason. For a bit more context, I married into a Jewish tradition (the Liss in Gomez-Liss is from my Polish-Jewish FIL) and I love so many Yiddish terms like lamedvavniks. It is righteous to try to live as a good person who doesn't want or expect recognition. I truly believe that the world is saved by such people. I think I know one who died in her 40s who is the model of my own motherhood. She was good through her grace and sacrifice, and we who write should be good through our writing. The art of writing is a sacrifice of our time and energies. And writing includes deciding what we choose not to publish. Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us. It gave me quite a bit to think about.
Thanks Zina for the thoughtful comment. I agree that prudence is a better term. In retrospect I chose Censorship more for headline purposes than for accuracy.
Prudence in fact is an underrated virtue, and I appreciate your highlighting it.
Email, or writing in general (as opposed to live interaction) affords us time to think and choose our words and sometimes that extra time serves as the pause need, to realize we are writing in anger and that anger may not serve us well. Of course, there have been times when I have not hit send. Sometimes I save a draft to be revisited and revised and sometimes I just delete it. The challenge is greater, in impromptu conversation, but there is no rule against taking a moment to think before opening our mouths. It is a generally good idea and the world would, indeed, be a better place if we all reflected, even for just a moment, before we spoke or hit send. But I will hit post now without a moment's thought.
I don't think I've ever got so far as to have something ready to publish when I've changed my mind, but there are things I've gotten part way through.
I've made a promise to myself that I'm going to be authentic in this newsletter and I'm not going to write opinions I don't truly hold in order to appease or virtue signal or whatever this and that. But that doesn't mean I have to say everything that comes into my head. And there are topics on which I do hold opinions, even firm opinions, but I do not feel that I am the person to say those things. Like a lack of a type of qualification, I guess? I don't THINK I would horribly disappoint people with my opinions but I still prefer to let people who are better off saying the things say the things.
It was more of the "I don't have to say everything that's in my head" aspect that led to my decision. Your own thought process about posting makes a lot of sense to me. It's always good to ask whether one has enough expertise and experience to make a judgment or give an opinion on a particular topic.
I'm glad you do the hard work. I only have to choose whether, or not, to comment which is much easier. I appreciate your work, and I'm specifically referring to the thought process behind it.
I'm still working on this, so it may not be my final analysis. My basic assumption is that people need to get used to the emotion of anger and learn not to be triggered by it.
I grew up in a family where nothing upsetting was allowed to be said. My parents provided very well for us in everything but emotions. It was their opinion that everything that went on under our roof was at least okay, so that no objection or dissent was legitimate. Then add on top of that, the fact that society still discourages and penalizes anger in women.
Anger is an extremely valuable emotion. It is the recognition that something is wrong and needs to be changed. The most mature form of anger is calm but implacable determination. This kind of anger does not need to bash anyone, but it will not rest until it reaches its goal. This kind of anger can also be realistic— it can evaluate goals as either achievable, partly achievable, or absolutely not achievable. It can rationally choose what direction this energy should go.
Anger is frustrated desire. It's the energy that keeps us moving toward a goal when there are obstacles in the way. There are some extreme forms of brain damage that remove a person's ability to want things. This becomes extremely crippling, because the person has no emotional impetus to move toward any goal. They can sit and think about what they might possibly want, and never take any action.
I am an emotional person who tends to want a lot of things. I tend to solve problems quickly, And these quick solutions often tend to work poorly. Fortunately, because I live alone, these "solutions" tend to affect no one but me. I find myself generating one or two of these quickie non solutions, before I calmly sit myself down and say, "Let's think about what might actually work.'
Anger is the energy that moves us toward goals. I think it is a lot more benign than the emotion of fear, which can cause us to overreact so easily.
Thanks Kathleen. I agree that anger can be used as energy and be cathartic. I do fear losing my temper. probably because I was scared when my mother lost hers. I do get angry, but never want to be thought of as an angry person among a large group of people. It's easier for me to be angry one on one. And easiest by far to be angry at myself.
If you do have further thoughts, I hope you'll share them.
It is interesting that you and I come from opposite backgrounds. To use psychobabble, in your family anger was under regulated, and in mine it was over regulated.
Strangely, I have never found anger cathartic. Weeping with grief can be cathartic for me— and grief comes when you cannot have what you want, whether it's a deceased loved one or a goal that you know cannot be obtained.
I wouldn't mind being known as the most determined and dogged person in a room. I know that can upset others, because "go along and get along" is a very comfortable place to live. When I realize that someone just doesn't share my project, I don't put pressure on them—I don't subject them to my passion. The most extreme leader types don't cut anyone that kind of slack.
My professional field of history lets me know about a near infinite number of things that have gone wrong in the last 5000 years. All of this used to trigger my anger, but in the long run it helped me learn how to manage it.
One of the things I am very interested in is the Enneagram. It posits that people are moved by one dominant emotion— anger, fear, or sensitivity to what others think of you.
Obviously for me, anger dominates. For you, it's one of the other two.
Hmmm. That leads to the question of whether making some people angry as a cost of making other people think is a saintly move. One could equally argue that the saintly move is to accept the anger of others because suppressing what you see to be the truth is the worse alternative. I don't think anyone would argue that the situation in Gaza is beyond ghastly--the disagreement comes in assigning responsibility for the situation and determining what each side needs to do now. I see no way to hash out those emotionally fraught issues without inciting anger. The second, of course, is the only one that matters now but there can be no resolution of that one without dragging in the first. Also, one could argue that Jews have both survived and thrived because they refused to suppress what they thought to be the truth. Mixing religions, it needs to be borne in mind that many who achieved sainthood did so because they sacrificed themselves to that very conviction.
Thanks. To extend the point...once the subjectivity of the decision to express or suppress is established, the audience is taken out of it. In other words, it becomes the decision of the communicator which path to choose based solely on whether he or she wants to get the point out enough to risk provoking those who will react emotionally, anger being an emotional rather than an analytic reaction. That, in turns, leads to whether it is worth it to try to reach those who will take in the argument in the spirit it was presented and ignore those who might not. Since you read my posts, you know which side of that I come down on.
Is this a quote? Did you just write this? Brilliant. I'm writing this one down and if anyone ever asks me, "Who said that?" I'll say, "Why it was Sam Rittenberg, of course."
Thanks Pandraior!
Thanks Maureen. Good and appreciated advice.
The great thing about Substack (and also the stressful thing if you're trying to obey a positing schedule, there's always next week's post !
Thanks Isabel. This is the first time I've done this. But these are unusually rancorous times on Substack with the contesting letters about moderation or the lack thereof.
About that spelling, Hanuka is a relevant demontration. It is a Hebrew word, as is lamedvavnik. So, can there be a right spelling in English? It is, after all, a transliteration -- a phonetic spelling of a foreign language. It seems to me that there cannot be one correct way to spell it as some sounds just don't even exist in English. As a kid, I remember Chanukah as the spelling of choice but someone dropped the C. Some write it with 2 n's. I go for the simplest, which is Hanuka but spellcheck doesn't like it. Now, I don't know if the spellcheck on my laptop speaks Hebrew or is Jewish, so I just rebel and write Hanuka. So, fear not, if it sounds like the Hebrew (and yours does) it can't be wrong. So ends today's lesson in transliteration. :)
Fire Ready Aim is a common thing in many arenas of personal and professional life.. Yes, time teaches by failure that reconsideration is a mark of maturing.
Carpenter's wisdom applies here. Measure twice. Cut once.
Thanks Doug.
Great post David, and to answer your question, yes. I have decided not to publish a post a handful of times. Usually for the reason you gave here. It only adds to the anger.
Glad I'm in good company. Wonder if Stephen King ever published something he'd like to take back!
Teillhard de Chardin would also approve. Better to squelch the wrong thought than release it into the noosphere, where it will circulate endlessly.
True, the stakes are higher with the permanence of the cloud!
Oh yes, the original “cloud” 🤣
We will forever live under the cloud, but that's just more reason to let some light in whenever and however we can. (Hey, that's pretty good, no?) :)
Challenging decision I would think, particularly in light of the work that went into the article you intended to release. I have been a bit torn by the debates taking place and have tried to stay on the sidelines, focusing instead on the small corner of substack where my passion resides. Thanks for sharing about that Jewish tradition. I was unfamiliar with that and found it interesting and enlightening. All the best David!
Thanks Matthew. I feel good with the decision so that says something.
I meant to comment about the tradition. We certainly know how to "reason" around things sometimes!
yet 700 times more likely than winning Powerball®️
You never know.....
Thanks for the calculation!
Thanks for this post. It's reminding me to add The Last of The Just to my 2024 book list. I hope you're printing out hard-copies of your work.
A post by Caroline of Talking to Myself this morning reminded me of that project.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-139758376?source=queue
Yes. Many. And like Mr. Truman, "Some of the best letters I ever wrote, were the ones I never sent."
I worked in domestic violence victim services for 25 years, and I often encouraged victims to write a letter to their abuser saying everything they ever wanted to say about the harms they perpetrated and the effects of those harms. It was never the intention to send it, just to get the cathartic release from the exercise.
One victim years ago decided to read the letter to her remorseful husband (and father of their four children) during a meetup at a diner after their break up. We did safety planning around the entire encounter to make sure she was prepared for an adverse reaction from him. He cried as she read it, and so did she. When she was done, he pulled out his own letter, expressing recognition and regret for all the ways he had hurt her and by extension, the children. I don’t know if they ever reunited; I left that job soon after. And this situation is by leaps and bounds the exception rather than the rule when it comes to abusers potentially changing their stripes. But it shows that unsent letters still have great value, and that probably on occasion, some of them should indeed be sent.
Amy, thanks for sharing that story. And you made me realize that my unsent post was perhaps too much for me and not for those reading it.
You can always post it another day, if the time seems right. I trust your judgement and I suspect others would agree.
I'm writing down this quote. Thx for posting. Interesting too since Truman has been coming up in my life these days.
Lincoln wrote dozens of letters during the Civil War that he never sent.
However, he did write this letter and sent it to McClellan who was notorious for his reluctance to attack the Southern Army.
“You tell me you cannot go after Lee because the cavalry horses are tired. Could you tell me what the cavalry horses have been doing to get tired?”
Eventually Mcclellan did leave Washington to confront Lee, but he took about 10 days to go 70 miles.
I have a number of pieces which I feel passionately about, but I have not posted. It seems like they are waiting for an event to trigger their significance. (I had a post on Telemachus that sat in limbo forever until I read someone's very personal piece about his divorce. I felt like a bird called from across the river and I my piece served as a refrain.) I have been reading the responses to Nazis/free speech issue just like everyone else, but I have not responded despite having my own opinions. Your post, which I greatly appreciate, hinges on the definition of "censorship" and I guess my quibble would be that it is not the most precise word for what you are describing. Rather, I think you are exercising what I, as a Catholic, would call Prudence. From Wikipedia: Prudence (Latin: prudentia, contracted from providentia meaning "seeing ahead, sagacity") is the ability to govern and discipline oneself by the use of reason. For a bit more context, I married into a Jewish tradition (the Liss in Gomez-Liss is from my Polish-Jewish FIL) and I love so many Yiddish terms like lamedvavniks. It is righteous to try to live as a good person who doesn't want or expect recognition. I truly believe that the world is saved by such people. I think I know one who died in her 40s who is the model of my own motherhood. She was good through her grace and sacrifice, and we who write should be good through our writing. The art of writing is a sacrifice of our time and energies. And writing includes deciding what we choose not to publish. Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us. It gave me quite a bit to think about.
Thanks Zina for the thoughtful comment. I agree that prudence is a better term. In retrospect I chose Censorship more for headline purposes than for accuracy.
Prudence in fact is an underrated virtue, and I appreciate your highlighting it.
This is rough test for judging potential communication— does it contain more heat than light?
Prudence! Yes! Instead of self-censoring, it's prudence. Thx for this.
Email, or writing in general (as opposed to live interaction) affords us time to think and choose our words and sometimes that extra time serves as the pause need, to realize we are writing in anger and that anger may not serve us well. Of course, there have been times when I have not hit send. Sometimes I save a draft to be revisited and revised and sometimes I just delete it. The challenge is greater, in impromptu conversation, but there is no rule against taking a moment to think before opening our mouths. It is a generally good idea and the world would, indeed, be a better place if we all reflected, even for just a moment, before we spoke or hit send. But I will hit post now without a moment's thought.
Your comments are always intriguing and appreciated, Josh, so keep hitting that button!
Here's a rough test for judging potential communication— does it contain more heat than light?
I don't think I've ever got so far as to have something ready to publish when I've changed my mind, but there are things I've gotten part way through.
I've made a promise to myself that I'm going to be authentic in this newsletter and I'm not going to write opinions I don't truly hold in order to appease or virtue signal or whatever this and that. But that doesn't mean I have to say everything that comes into my head. And there are topics on which I do hold opinions, even firm opinions, but I do not feel that I am the person to say those things. Like a lack of a type of qualification, I guess? I don't THINK I would horribly disappoint people with my opinions but I still prefer to let people who are better off saying the things say the things.
It was more of the "I don't have to say everything that's in my head" aspect that led to my decision. Your own thought process about posting makes a lot of sense to me. It's always good to ask whether one has enough expertise and experience to make a judgment or give an opinion on a particular topic.
I'm glad you do the hard work. I only have to choose whether, or not, to comment which is much easier. I appreciate your work, and I'm specifically referring to the thought process behind it.
I'm still working on this, so it may not be my final analysis. My basic assumption is that people need to get used to the emotion of anger and learn not to be triggered by it.
I grew up in a family where nothing upsetting was allowed to be said. My parents provided very well for us in everything but emotions. It was their opinion that everything that went on under our roof was at least okay, so that no objection or dissent was legitimate. Then add on top of that, the fact that society still discourages and penalizes anger in women.
Anger is an extremely valuable emotion. It is the recognition that something is wrong and needs to be changed. The most mature form of anger is calm but implacable determination. This kind of anger does not need to bash anyone, but it will not rest until it reaches its goal. This kind of anger can also be realistic— it can evaluate goals as either achievable, partly achievable, or absolutely not achievable. It can rationally choose what direction this energy should go.
Anger is frustrated desire. It's the energy that keeps us moving toward a goal when there are obstacles in the way. There are some extreme forms of brain damage that remove a person's ability to want things. This becomes extremely crippling, because the person has no emotional impetus to move toward any goal. They can sit and think about what they might possibly want, and never take any action.
I am an emotional person who tends to want a lot of things. I tend to solve problems quickly, And these quick solutions often tend to work poorly. Fortunately, because I live alone, these "solutions" tend to affect no one but me. I find myself generating one or two of these quickie non solutions, before I calmly sit myself down and say, "Let's think about what might actually work.'
Anger is the energy that moves us toward goals. I think it is a lot more benign than the emotion of fear, which can cause us to overreact so easily.
Thanks Kathleen. I agree that anger can be used as energy and be cathartic. I do fear losing my temper. probably because I was scared when my mother lost hers. I do get angry, but never want to be thought of as an angry person among a large group of people. It's easier for me to be angry one on one. And easiest by far to be angry at myself.
If you do have further thoughts, I hope you'll share them.
It is interesting that you and I come from opposite backgrounds. To use psychobabble, in your family anger was under regulated, and in mine it was over regulated.
Strangely, I have never found anger cathartic. Weeping with grief can be cathartic for me— and grief comes when you cannot have what you want, whether it's a deceased loved one or a goal that you know cannot be obtained.
I wouldn't mind being known as the most determined and dogged person in a room. I know that can upset others, because "go along and get along" is a very comfortable place to live. When I realize that someone just doesn't share my project, I don't put pressure on them—I don't subject them to my passion. The most extreme leader types don't cut anyone that kind of slack.
My professional field of history lets me know about a near infinite number of things that have gone wrong in the last 5000 years. All of this used to trigger my anger, but in the long run it helped me learn how to manage it.
One of the things I am very interested in is the Enneagram. It posits that people are moved by one dominant emotion— anger, fear, or sensitivity to what others think of you.
Obviously for me, anger dominates. For you, it's one of the other two.
Hmmm. That leads to the question of whether making some people angry as a cost of making other people think is a saintly move. One could equally argue that the saintly move is to accept the anger of others because suppressing what you see to be the truth is the worse alternative. I don't think anyone would argue that the situation in Gaza is beyond ghastly--the disagreement comes in assigning responsibility for the situation and determining what each side needs to do now. I see no way to hash out those emotionally fraught issues without inciting anger. The second, of course, is the only one that matters now but there can be no resolution of that one without dragging in the first. Also, one could argue that Jews have both survived and thrived because they refused to suppress what they thought to be the truth. Mixing religions, it needs to be borne in mind that many who achieved sainthood did so because they sacrificed themselves to that very conviction.
You express the conundrum well!
Thanks. To extend the point...once the subjectivity of the decision to express or suppress is established, the audience is taken out of it. In other words, it becomes the decision of the communicator which path to choose based solely on whether he or she wants to get the point out enough to risk provoking those who will react emotionally, anger being an emotional rather than an analytic reaction. That, in turns, leads to whether it is worth it to try to reach those who will take in the argument in the spirit it was presented and ignore those who might not. Since you read my posts, you know which side of that I come down on.
We seem to be exploring the wisdom of restraint, without taking into account the sometimes terrible price of silence.
Ah, great point Sam.
Is this a quote? Did you just write this? Brilliant. I'm writing this one down and if anyone ever asks me, "Who said that?" I'll say, "Why it was Sam Rittenberg, of course."