The Tyranny of Petty Coercion
May 31, 2007 By: almostgotit Category: Marilynne Robinson, books, courage, encouragement, feminism, reviews, writersWe have a wonderful used-book store in our city, which until recently was within walking distance of our house. One of our favorite pastimes was to rummage through the “free bins” parked outside the store.
We found many treasures in it: a whole entire set of encyclopedias, for instance, missing only “volume 11.” Thousands of Martha Stewart magazines, back when she even still dared put her face on every cover. Tattered books in Italian, or about calculus, with which to impress one’s older brother. And once, an ancient copy of Atlantic Monthly, in which I found an essay by Marilynne Robinson about courage and the petty coercion of society that conspires against it. It was gorgeous.
It drove me crazy to misplace it, which I inevitably did, almost immediately.
Anyway, a few weeks ago, in a fit of extravagance, I ordered several books from Amazon.com (to get the “free shipping,” of course) and among them I chose one by Marilynne Robinson called The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought. I’d seen the list of contents and knew my essay wasn’t in it.
But tonight, after an exhausting day I started leafing through the book. And there, at the very end, the final essay in the collection, I found it. Really! I don’t know how it got there, but it feels like a gift. This is what it’s called:
“The Tyranny of Petty Coercion.”
Which (my usually good memory not-withstanding) apparently appeared in the August 2004 issue of Harper’s Monthly, not in the Atlantic, and here, moreover, is a quote:
Courage seems to me to be dependent on cultural definition. By this I do not mean only that it is a word that blesses different behaviors in different cultures, though that is clearly true. I mean also, and more importantly, that courage is rarely expressed except where there is sufficient consensus to support it. Theologians used to write about a prevenient grace, which enables the soul to accept grace itself. Perhaps there must also be a prevenient courage to nerve one to be brave. It is we human beings who give one another permission to show courage, or, more typically, withhold such permission. We also internalize prohibitions, enforcing them on ourselves – prohibitions against, for example, expressing an honest doubt, or entertaining one. This ought not to be true in a civilization like ours, historically committed to valuing individual conscience and free expression. But it is.
. . .
It is sad to consider how much first-rate courage must be devoted in this world to struggling out of the toils of sheer pettiness. The Saudi women who first drove automobiles risked and suffered penalties, overcame inhibitions, and shattered norms, heroic in their defiance of an absurd convention. We have our own Rosa Parks. That such great courage should have been required to challenge such petty barriers is a demonstration of the power of social consensus. How many minor coercions are required to sustain similar customs and usages? How aware are any of us, absent direct challenge, of how we also deal in trivial coercion?
June 1st, 2007 at 1:55 pm
Have you read Robinson’s ‘Gilead’? It’s a thought-provoking, wise, amazingly real letter/journal from an elderly, dying father to his very young son—filled with religion, love, and human foible. The first fiction she’s written since ‘Housekeeping.’ I loved it.
—-
Almost replies: I have *started* Gilead. Robinson also teaches at the Iowa Writer’s workshop, and in one of my dream-futures I plan to go there…
April 21st, 2008 at 4:33 pm
[...] “Fixing the Women:” not enough to overcome pay inequity The Tyranny of Petty Coercion [...]
October 16th, 2008 at 6:18 pm
“Prevenient Grace” is an interesting term, as is her application of it to courage. My tempatation is to get smart-alecky and go recursive by asking whether one needs a “Preprevenient Grace” to make the way for Prevenient Grace. Whoops! I just did.
Kidding aside, these are a fine couple of pargraphs. I’d like to read the whole thing. As I’m beginning to understand from reading Gilead, Robinson plants her thoughts in some pretty rich soil.
I will add that while coercions may often be petty, it seems to me that the grounds for these petty concerns are anything but. The expectation that blacks had to sit at the backs of buses was a kind of petty coercion, as was the expectation that they use different drinking fountains and even go to different stores. But these individual expectations were merely the mechanisms by which an ineradicable prejudice casts a shadow over all our lives. Some lives more than others, obviously. Moreover, this social bias is grounded in the immoral acceptance of the untruth that blacks are less human than non-blacks.
In other words, it isn’t just sitting at the back of a bus or being pulled over for a DWF (Driving While Female). This is actually the brighter side of a continuum that includes, in each case, lynching and genital mutilation.
Or maybe this is part of Robinson’s point? That heinous activities are tolerated because people live day in and day out with the petty coercion of socially accepted behaviour, which ensnares almost everyone in such a way that they’re no longer able to make the distinction between “petty” and “heinous”?
I’m intrigued. I’ll have to read the essay.
October 16th, 2008 at 6:27 pm
My reading was that while we are often aware of major coercions, particularly those that occurred In the Past or Someplace Else — in other words, safely separated from our own realm of responsibility — few of us pay attention to the petty coercions we endure (and perpetrate) every day… which, in turn, exactly pave the way for the heinous ones.