On Disclaimers

First of all, at their least insidious, disclaimers are BORING. They are just. so. boring. We feel compelled to use them, but no one wants to hear them! Because they’re boring. And a literal waste of time. When Al writes a new song, I’m often one of the privileged first listeners. But when she’s ready to present and must first list the reasons one or I might critique the song (because that’s what a disclaimer is—anticipation of imagined potential critique), I’m booooored. I just want to hear the song! I’m excited for it! I’m ready! I’m an eager supporter, and each disclaimer is a boring little fly I have to swat aside to get to the goods.

Moomers has been developing her own brand of disclaimer that I particularly enjoy pointing out. When showing me the new shirt she got at J. Jill: “It’s not the most aMAZing top in the world, but I like it.” When offering me some of the pimento cheese she bought at the farmers’ market: “It’s not the most aMAZing pimento cheese in the world, but it’s good.” When telling me about the recent Dolores Hydock play she saw: “It wasn’t the most aMAZing play in the world, but it was entertaining.” I guess my bar can be pretty high. I’ve been known to turn over a cafe table or two at sub-most-amazing-in-the-world pimento cheese.

So disclaimers are boring (or in Moomers’ case a little endearing). Boring happens in life, though, and people can deal with boring if they have to. But disclaimers can also be harmful.

My Senior year of college I took a Shakespeare class. One of our assignments was to memorize a sonnet, recite it in front of the class, and verbally explicate it. (As an aside, I unwittingly chose a sonnet about semen, so that was cool.) When it was my turn, I got up and immediately said something about how I felt underprepared and that my presentation probably wasn’t going to be that good. My professor stopped me and said, very pointedly, though not unkindly, “Don’t ever do that again. Because you’re probably going to do a fine job. But you basically said that however good of job you do isn’t really good enough, and how do you think that makes your classmates feel?”

I had never thought about the nature of disclaimers before that interaction, but Dr. Davis was right, and I’m very thankful to him. Disclaimers are inherently judgmental. It’s one thing for Al, who is the only one of us writing a song, to give a boring disclaimer to me, but if there were a group of songwriters sharing their work, and Al led her song with disclaimers, she would be inherently judging the work of everyone else in the group. She would be setting a bar, and even though she would claim her own song didn’t reach the bar, the bar would remain, nonetheless, for everyone else.

I see this bar set all the time on Instagram. We feel compelled to mention the mess in the background or the baby weight we still carry or the makeup we don’t yet have on. Setting bars left and right for ourselves and everyone else. We do it so involuntarily we don’t even think about it. We almost can’t not do it.

Why are we thus compelled?? Why do we need to anticipate and acknowledge imagined potential critique? Maybe we believe that other people are actually judging us. And maybe they are. I think it’s likely that if we imagine others to be judging us, we are judging others in the same ways. Our own judging is probably the best evidence we have that we ourselves are being judged. Maybe we feel compelled to anticipate potential critique because we don’t want to appear naive or unaware of our imperfections and insufficiencies. We may not reach our own standards, but at least we know what good standards are. Our good taste is one thing we’ve got going for us. Maybe we’re compelled to name potential critiques because we don’t truly accept the reality of our own imperfections. If we accepted them, I don’t think we would feel the need to even mention them. If we had some peace with the imperfection of things, they wouldn’t be worth our notice or attention.

The root of the disclaimer is pride. The idea that we should look better than we do, that our work should be flawless, that our houses should be cleaner than they are is laughable. We’re people. Yes, we’re made in God’s image as creative beings, and there are eternally significant ways in which great worth has been bestowed upon us, but also, we’re all dumb little people. Even the most esteemed among us. I’m confident that our sense of what perfection is is so incredibly imperfect in the eyes of God. None of us even have a clue.

There’s tons of freedom to be had when we believe in and accept the “insufficiency that one day [we] will have to discover” (C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain). Giving disclaimers is a way to keep that discovery and acceptance at bay, and so we prolong the harm of prideful self-deception and judgment of the people around us. So let’s just do our thing, whatever our thing is at the moment. And not take ourselves too seriously. Let’s stop being boring, and let’s work on removing arbitrary bars constructed by human judgment.

DOWN WITH DISCLAIMERS!!!

Sarah

P.S. In an effort to avoid giving disclaimers, don’t lead with, “OK I’m not gonna give any disclaimers, I’m just gonna jump right in,” because you just gave every possible disclaimer you could have in one fell swoop, and you know it. 🙂