In praise of curiosity: Evelyn Glennie

Evelyn Glennie is probably the leading percussionist of our day—and she is profoundly deaf. Listening to her TED talk could be one of the best things you do with the next eighteen minutes: https://www.ted.com/talks/evelyn_glennie_shows_how_to_listen. 

Marriage equality comes to New York

New York just became the sixth (and most populous) state to grant marriage rights to gay couples. Now it seems that the only people who remain politically and economically disadvantaged are single renters, who contribute comparatively little to the wedding, childbearing/rearing, and mortgage industries. (In a nation of "consumers"—the preferred American descriptor for what other democracies call "citizens"—it is the size of one's economic footprint that matters, not one's ecological footprint.)[1]

It's a bit ironic that gay couples have fought so hard to enjoy the social legitimacy of a contractual relationship that has so often spelled hierarchy and inequality for the participants. (A recent New Yorker cartoon shows two men in a domestic scene, with the apron-wearing partner saying he wants equality in marriage.) Perhaps this is what really frightens religious homophobes: the possibility that gay marriage will undermine the structural inequality that the religious right believes proper for heterosexual relations. Heterosexuals should be so lucky!  I have gay friends who have been more happily married, and for more years, than many straight couples; I also have gay friends who feel ambivalent about the institution of marriage while still applauding New York's decision, given the socioeconomic realities of contemporary life. One gay friend wrote wistfully of the days when to be gay was to be an outsider, anti-bourgeois; I know several who view the desire of so many gay couples to have children as a mere ploy for social acceptance or, at best, a result of straight culture's brain-washing.

Although I do not have children myself and believe that dominant narratives should always be scrutinized, I think this particular view condemns with too broad a stroke. There are certainly wrong-headed motives for having children—to seek cultural legitimacy, personal validation, or unconditional love (any of which is sure to backfire when said children are born) — but there are generous motives, too.  Any sensitive, thoughtful person, gay or straight, could conceivably want to provide love and guidance to a vulnerable young human, and the world contains far too many unwanted children who desperately need to be adopted into loving homes. Rescuing such children from a life of feeling unwanted and alienated is a noble endeavor, and perhaps no one is better suited to the task than someone who has experienced such wounds and managed to learn, from examining their own suffering, how to strengthen others.

In a similar vein, there's a difference between those who yearn to spend their lives freely and openly with the person they love and those who seek to marry simply because it is expected, all their friends are doing it, or their parents are pressuring them. A case could be made that people who have long been deprived of a right are that much more appreciative of it—there is, in fact, evidence that granting marriage rights to gay couples, who divorce less than heterosexual couples, actually reduces the divorce rate among heterosexuals as well. (Not that we should make too much of statistics, for they tell only a small part of any story.) And it surprises many people to learn that there is a long history of gay marriage in other cultures and historical periods, dating from the ancient Greeks and continuing into the 18th century among Native American tribes [2]. To ignore this history, not to mention the equally long history of long-term heterosexual love, is to disdain those relationships that do endure, among humans as well as many other species.

Human motives are complex, however, and, often as not, confused and opaque even to the most introspective among us.  All I can say is that it is best to carefully consider why we want to marry or not marry, to have children or not, and to make sure that when we undertake actions that necessarily and profoundly affect another sentient being we consider the consequences with a rigor as robust as the passion we feel [3].  Here we can find inspiration in two poets, one 19th century German (Heinrich Heine) and one 20th century American (Dorothy Parker), who achieved crystalline clarity about what they wanted from marriage:

Die Heimkehr [4]
LXXII

Und bist du erst mein ehlich Weib,

Dann bist du zu beneiden,

Dann lebst du in lauter Zeitvertreib,

In lauter Pläsier und Freuden.

Und wenn du schiltst und wenn du tobst,

Ich werd es geduldig leiden;

Doch wenn du meine Verse nicht lobst,

Laß ich mich von dir scheiden.

*

If you shall be my faithful wife

Then fortune on you shines.

You'll live a gay and carefree life

Of leisurely pastimes.

And if you scold and if you rave

I'll abide it all with pleasure.

But if my poems you will not praise

Then let us split forever.

Fighting Words

Say my love is easy had,

Say I'm bitten raw with pride,

Say I am too often sad—

Still behold me at your side.

Say I'm neither brave nor young,

Say I woo and coddle care,

Say the devil touched my tongue—

Still you have my heart to wear.

But say my verses do not scan,

And I get me another man!

May we all find an appreciative audience, whether straight, gay, or ameobic.

_____________


Footnotes


[1] The economic impact of this decision was not lost on anyone: marriage (or, rather, weddings) are projected to add $142 million to the NYC economy and $184 million to NY state as a whole. Another angle that should not be overlooked: this is the first time gay marriage has passed in a state where one of the houses was controlled by Republicans. Back in 2009, when Democrats controlled the state house and senate, the gay marriage bill was roundly defeated (by 14 votes).  On Friday, the bill won by a four-vote margin (33 to 29). 

[2] That is, before Protestant Europeans dedicated themselves to imposing gender dimorphism on the "savages" who were otherwise living happily with each other and the rest of the natural world. So much for progress.  See, for example, Michael Bronski, A Queer History of the United States (2011), and Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, John d'Emilio and Estelle Freedman (1988, 1997). The latter book is a classic and was cited by Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy when he struck down a Texas law criminalizing sodomy.

[3] This includes the decision to acquire a pet. Today I was walking down a Manhattan street and saw a young couple, probably in their twenties, stepping out of a souped-up black car to deposit a tiny, and I mean tiny, pit bull puppy on the sidewalk. I had the impression they wanted it to "do business" but the poor thing looked lost and very fragile. I asked how old it was as I stooped down to give it some affection and protect it from the stark sun, if not the heated pavement; the young man, thick arms crossed in front of his capacious chest, said "almost 4 weeks." I tried to suppress my horror and said that was awfully young. The man, this boy, really, mumbled, "it's ok, we have a book... we give it milk." I dared not ask what kind; images of chocolate and strawberry milk cartons popped into my head.

I pointed out that puppies need more than milk from their mother, and continued supporting this tender little fellow whose cerebellar development was so incomplete he could barely stand without wavering. Or maybe he was dehydrated: he tried to suckle my finger, and the boy gruffed, "no biting," to which I replied that he might be hot and thirsty. Hefty boy was unimpressed.

Puppies should not be taken from the mother before 8 weeks; 10 weeks is even better, and frankly, we don't know how much better it would be if we didn't make a habit of breaking up canine families at all.  (A famous wag once wrote that the only reason dogs hadn't yet acquired language is because we take them away from their families so young.) I really didn't know what to do; I tried gently admonishing this young guy and his girlfriend, but walked away wondering if I should have told them to report the person who sold or gave them such a young dog. This was a set-up for disaster, and these kids had absolutely no idea what they were doing. Sadly, I am certain their ignorance was learned: had they been wisely parented themselves, they could not have been so obtuse.


[4] It's exceedingly difficult to translate poetry well—to capture both the sense and the sensibility of it. I was delighted to find that Justin Erik Halldór Smith has met the challenge beautifully with his translation of this Heinrich Heine poem.

Since I first posted this, I have altered the essay in several ways. Most importantly, I had quoted a friend anonymously but without asking her permission, and I have removed the quote. I usually would not have been so careless, but two friends had expressed virtually the same thought, except that one wrote and the other spoke. I therefore quoted the written lines, which the other person could just as well have thought were his, but on principle I should have asked. I am normally punctilious about such issues, and I regret the error. I amended the passage, which in the end led me to reconsider and clarify what I was really trying to say anyway.

The Iliad, bin Laden, and a Mother's Day Proclamation

I've been quiet about the assassination/murder/execution of bin Laden, in part because the blogosphere has been full of opinions, but mostly because of feeling there are many other Important Matters to ponder. But I have finally decided that there is one important thing to articulate about the headlines of this week besides the question of whether anyone really believes the death of this one individual is going to diminish terrorist activities around the globe. (Which, after all, was the ostensible motive for killing him.)

It is this: that conservative estimates of the number of people killed in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan since the U.S. coalition attacks began is nearly 1 million. That's more than 300 times the number of people killed on September 11, 2001. According to U.S. State Department data, that's also 130 times more people than were killed in all terrorist attacks around the world from 1993-2004. (Numbers after 2004 remain classified, since they suggested that the U.S. wars were actually fomenting terrorist attacks, rather than striking terror into the terrorists' hearts.) The cost of these wars has plunged us into an economic whirlpool of debt, with ever-widening currents sucking jobs and public services into the deep. Talk about Pyrrhic victories.

The most recent issue of Harper's Magazine contains a lengthy essay by Nicholson Baker, "Why I'm a Pacifist: The Dangerous Myth of the Good War." He examines the circumstances surrounding the US entry into World War II and the result, concluding, along with a number of historians, that this act actually fueled Hitler's rush to exterminate the Jews. I am not a WWII historian, but it's a provocative argument.

I've also been reminded of Simone Weil's beautiful, exceptionally moving essay, "The Iliad, or the Poem of Force," published initially in 1940 after the fall of France. It opens thus:

The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad is force. Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man's flesh shrinks away. In this work, at all times, the human spirit is shown as modified by its relations with force, as swept away, blinded by the very force it imagined it could handle, as deformed by the weight of the force it submits to. For those dreamers who considered that force, thanks to progress, would soon be a thing of the past, the Iliad could appear as an historical document; for others, whose powers of recognition are more acute and who perceive force, today as yesterday, at the very center of human history, the Iliad is the purest and the loveliest of mirrors.

To define force—it is that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him. Somebody was here, and the next minute there is nobody here at all; this is a spectacle the Iliad never wearies of showing us....

The rest of the essay's 24 pages are equally potent; I recommend reading it as a perspective-altering, almost transcendental experience. And it is very much relevant to us today, when our society is riven by internecine strife between people who cannot communicate because they have forgotten the extent to which circumstance and necessity impinge upon the human soul. Again, Weil's words:

... nothing is so rare as to see misfortune fairly portrayed; the tendency is either to treat the unfortunate person as though catastrophe were his natural vocation, or to ignore the effects of misfortune on the soul, to assume, that is, that the soul can suffer and remain unmarked by it, can fail, in fact, to be recast in misfortune's image. [...]

Both the Romans and the Hebrews believed themselves to be exempt from the misery that is the common human lot. The Romans saw their country as the nation chosen by destiny to be mistress of the world; with the Hebrews, it was their God who exalted them and they retained their superior position just as long as they obeyed Him. Strangers, enemies, conquered peoples, subjects, slaves, were objects of contempt to the Romans; and the Romans had no epics, no tragedies. In Rome gladiatorial fights took the place of tragedy. With the Hebrews, misfortune was a sure indication of sin and hence a legitimate object of contempt; to them a vanquished enemy was abhorrent to God himself and condemned to expiate all sorts of crimes—this is a view that makes cruelty permissible and indeed indispensable....Throughout twenty centuries of Christianity, the Romans and the Hebrews have been admired, read, imitated, both in deed and word; their masterpieces have yielded an appropriate quotation every time anybody had a crime he wanted to justify.

Americans, too, lack a tradition of tragedy—treacle doesn't count—and American exceptionalism is everywhere in evidence, from political speeches to economic debates to the unwillingness of many to face our environmental crisis. Is it any wonder that we spawned Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo? Are they our gladiatorial rings?

In honor of Mother's Day, let me also share a portion of Julia Ward Howe's Mother's Day Proclamation, written in 1870 in reaction to the carnage of the Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War:

We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy, and patience.
We, the women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.

Their vision, of an international council of women, was simplistic, but the sentiment, I think, was right.

Observations on the 19th c. Japanese response to natural disasters

One of the themes of this still-new blog is the revelatory potential of perspectives brought by history, other cultures, and other disciplines. Julian Sands' beautiful essay in this week's London Review of Books explores Japan's present-day reaction to March's triple disaster (earthquake-tsunami-nuclear reactor meltdown) through a 19th century Japanese lens. I was so struck by the inversion of our present-day values that I wanted to share it with you; excerpts are below but the whole can be found through the link above. 

On 11 November 1855, a massive earthquake and tsunami destroyed most of Japan's capital city, Edo, the precursor of modern Tokyo. Roughly 7000 people were reported dead or injured, and the numbers rose in the days that followed. There were no newspapers published in the city—the shogun's government forbade public comment on anything directly concerning the regime—but by the end of the year hundreds of woodblock broadsheets had appeared with stories and interpretations of the disaster. Among the surviving broadsheets one type stands out: colour woodblock prints depicting the earthquake as a catfish.

 

Since the 17th century, folklore had associated catfish with earthquakes. It was said that a giant catfish lay under a stone at the Kashima shrine... The god of the shrine had the duty of holding the catfish down. When he neglected his job, the catfish would wake up and shake, causing earthquakes. The god of Kashima seems to have been peculiarly negligent around this time: an earthquake destroyed the castle in the city of Odawara in 1853, another struck near the imperial shrine of Ise in the summer of 1854, and two tsunamis caused thousands of deaths along the Pacific coast that autumn. These events occurred soon after the arrival of American gunships under Commodore Perry forced the shogunate to open its ports to trade, rocking a dynastic system that had maintained stability in Japan for 250 years. It is not surprising that many in Edo believed the gods had chosen this time to overturn the existing world and start things anew....

I have been showing these pictures to students for years, interested in what they tell us about the period, but until the earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan on 11 March it had never occurred to me just how remarkable and strange to modern sensibilities this outburst of satirical humour in the face of disaster was.

The example reproduced here, ‘Mr Moneybags Launches Forth His Ship of Treasure’, employs a common motif: the suffering of elite merchants and the delight of working men. The man at the top is a wealthy miser: with the encouragement of a catfish, he is vomiting gold coins. Three men wearing the blue leggings, jackets and cloth headbands of craftsmen and builders scramble for the fallen money. The catfish lectures the miser: ‘Sir, you suffer now because you oppressed those beneath you in ordinary times. It would be well for you to change your ways and practise charity and virtue.’ Meanwhile, one of the labourers tells his mates: ‘Don’t be greedy. If you save too much and an earthquake comes you’ll regret it: better to go and spend it at the temporary brothels and keep it circulating.’ Destruction of property naturally hurt the haves more than the have-nots, and construction workers in particular stood to profit from the city’s rebuilding. Indeed, just as many occupations seem to have profited as suffered in the aftermath of the earthquake.

Another print depicted two groups of people standing on either side of a catfish, one labelled ‘those who laugh’ (a carpenter, a plasterer, a lumber merchant, a roofer, a blacksmith, a prostitute, a physician and a street-food vendor) and the other ‘those who weep’ (a teahouse proprietor, a seller of eels, a seller of luxury goods, a diamond dealer, an import merchant, musicians and entertainers). A city made entirely of wood, paper and clay could be rebuilt in a matter of weeks, and reconstruction provided work at good wages to a large segment of the urban population...

Although Japan’s disaster-prone capital lies on a major faultline and tremors are frequent, fire was by far the more common source of destruction in the 19th century. A conflagration that turned several blocks to ashes occurred in Edo on average every five or six years... Since there was a seasonal rhythm to these events and the gap between them was short, Edo’s citizens learned to flee, then return and rebuild. They kept their belongings light and portable and lived in houses that were easily dismantled. In 1880, a fire swept through Kanda’s city centre, destroying 16 blocks of dense tenements and displacing 5986 people. The mayor reported that, fortunately, it had occurred during the day, so there were no deaths or injuries. With a population well prepared for disaster, destruction of property even on this scale was accommodated within the management of the city.

This accommodation was possible because the city’s light physical infrastructure was matched by a strong and enduring social infrastructure. The people of Edo policed themselves and fielded their own fire brigades. The wealthy property owners who had the most to lose from lawlessness and property damage paid directly for these services, which were provided by their tenants and employees, and established town residents provided alms to the poor until houses were rebuilt. Although this charity was in theory voluntary, the need to maintain neighbours’ respect (and keep their custom) made it effectively obligatory. After major disasters such as the earthquake of 1855, registers were compiled in each neighbourhood listing the names of donors and amounts given, making the contributions a matter of public record. Kitahara Itoko, Japan’s leading historian of disasters and the author of a social history of the 1855 quake, has found that the donations corresponded closely to the wealth of each household, with the city’s wealthiest merchant houses, like the Mitsui dry goods business, contributing more than a thousand gold pieces, while smaller shops contributed as little as a few coppers. The shogun’s government made a practice of rewarding almsgivers after disasters, but the same fixed amount was doled out to everyone on the register, so that the compensation was little more than a token to the wealthy but could be double the amount of the original donation in the case of a poor household.

The working man gathering Mr Moneybags’s treasure implicitly referred to a physiological theory of cycles in nature, of destruction followed by renewal. Like typhoon-season floods and dry-season fires, earthquakes and tsunamis were understood as corrections of temporary imbalances in the vital force perpetually flowing through the world (known in Japanese as ki and in Chinese as qi). Periodic eruptions of natural violence released pent-up force and kept both nature and human society healthy by renewing them. In a study of the catfish prints, Gregory Smits has shown that Confucian philosophers as well as ordinary people believed that the economy followed the same principles. Just as ki flowed continuously in nature, money should be kept moving in the economy too, not allowed to stagnate and foster greed. For this reason, many people viewed capital accumulation distrustfully. Nature, they believed, censured it. 

It would be a mistake to presume that these Japanese fatalistically accepted natural destruction. Other contemporary accounts reveal that Edoites mourned the loss of family and friends, that they commemorated their deaths solemnly and sought solace in religion. But the relief of having survived, the outpouring of private and public charity, the break from everyday life and its duties, the levelling effect of the shared crisis, and the economic activity and opportunities in the reconstruction that followed, gave a positive tone to many of the catfish prints, prompting Kitahara to coin the term ‘disaster utopia’ to describe the world they depict. Of course, the condition was temporary, and neither alms nor higher wages were sufficient to cause a fundamental change in the poverty of the masses in the city’s tenements. Nevertheless, since everyone suffered together, and practically everyone contributed alms to relieve that suffering, common folk could believe that nature – in the form of the trickster catfish – had indeed instigated a healthy social renewal, and that these were bright times. Many of the prints plainly celebrate the present: using a formulaic phrase containing equal measures of irony and genuine hope, they call it ‘this blessed age’.

[VL comment: this is quite a contrast to the world of "disaster capitalism," in which wealthy developers swoop in to buy up, rebuild, and profit from areas that have been decimated by disasters, leaving the original residents permanently displaced.  It is also noteworthy that private charity, strongly local, was enforced by a system of complete transparency that itself depended on a strong social fabric. Our atomized American culture is comparatively ill-equipped to care for the dispossessed.]

Why aren’t the Japanese celebrating today? If the Fukushima nuclear plant can be brought under control, post-disaster reconstruction, at least in the long term, holds out the possibility of social and economic renewal. Assistance is flowing into the tsunami-affected region, voluntarism is flourishing and there is talk of this being an opportunity to revitalise the country, evoking notions of economic stagnation and flow that Japanese would have readily understood 150 years ago. Yet a wide gulf separates the Japan of the mid-19th century from the Japan of the present. In its slow unfolding and the inequality of its social effects, March’s triple disaster may bear more resemblance to a premodern famine than to the earthquake-tsunami that destroyed the capital in 1855. No one ever welcomed a famine because of its potential for enabling renewal. The drawn-out disaster gradually exposed and exacerbated class and regional disparities. The tsunami also brought to the surface deep structural problems: the depopulation of rural areas and the advanced age of their inhabitants (the median age of tsunami victims was reportedly around 70); the economic fragility of Japanese farming, which depends on government subsidies and tight import restrictions; and the fragility of the food system, vulnerable as it is to the invisible threat of contamination.

...In Tokyo one of my former neighbours, a woman in her sixties, writes of ‘trains running on reduced schedules, blackouts and calls to save energy, shops half dark, heat off in the house – why, we lived this way just a little while ago. I can only hope this will be the turning point away from mass production and mass consumption, towards a sustainable society.’ For people like her, who remember the days before Japan’s economic take-off, the hope is that this disaster will lead to a reduced dependence on heavy technological infrastructure.

It is remarkable that a country so seismically active and vulnerable, and which had developed the art of light infrastructure, should have embraced nuclear power. Japan began building heavy in the 1870s, soon after the modern state that replaced the shogunate chose to join the international economic and military competition led by the Western imperial powers. The country’s first model factory, a silk filature built under French guidance, and its first planned commercial district, the main avenue of Ginza in central Tokyo, were both constructed from brick in 1872. A massive earthquake in central Honshu in 1891 damaged iron bridges and toppled brick buildings, sparking debate over the appropriateness of Western technology to Japan, and the possible superiority of the lightweight, flexible structures that carpenters had built there for centuries (Gregory Clancey’s brilliant book Earthquake Nation explores the cultural politics of this debate). The debate would continue into the era of nuclear power. Today, Tokyo’s skyscrapers are built with flexible frames, designed to sway in earthquakes. Yet nowhere have architects been able to match the light and quickly constructed urban fabric that Japanese artisans had perfected before modernisation.

Sands goes on to discuss changes wrought by nuclear power technology, the quintessential heavy infrastructure, in 20th century Japan, and he makes the case that the traditionally robust social network is inseparable from the light physical infrastructure that characterized 19th century city life. As various "slow" movements spring up here in the West—slow food, slow gardening, slow art, slow fashion, slow blogging (my neologism for my lengthy posts, perhaps not inappropriately close to "slogging")—I keep thinking that as human beings we long for the kinds of connections that really need to be forged face-to-face, slowly building trust and interdependence over time... in other words, locally. I am grateful for the internet, for the phone, for being able to communicate with dear friends who live far away and 'meet' new friends through comments on this and other blogs. But there is still something irreplaceable about inviting someone over for tea and pastries warm from the oven, about making music together, about having long conversations curled up on a cozy couch, that goes well beyond the advantage of not getting a sore ear from the telephone. Even suffering together through a disaster can be a bonding experience, if all members of a given community share a sense of responsibility.


Given the increasingly inescapable effects of climate change, we need to think about the consequences of our own "heavy infrastructure" for the social fabric of our communities as well as their ability to rebuild.

Plus ça change....

First, my apologies to those of you who have checked back to this blog for the past ten days, drumming your fingers on your laptops, impatiently waiting for a new post. (Yes, I can hear all two of you.)  I'd like to say it was all intentional—I'm a proponent of slow blogging— but a combination of work deadlines, a sprained sacro-iliac joint and arm problems from too much mousing slowed me down for a while. Nevertheless, I've been gestating a number of ideas and I am looking forward to posting about them this coming week.


In the meantime, I want to share a poem, "The Fat of the Land," by the Tang dynasty poet Bai Juyi (772-846 AD) as translated by Frederick Turner:

A cavalcade of arrogance rides through,

Harness and horse so bright the mere dust shines;

And may I ask what do these people do?

They're the imperial eunuch chamberlains.

If he's in red robes, he's a bureaucrat,

If in a purple sash, a general;

Off to the army banquet, proud of that,

They gallop past, like clouds before a squall.

Nine vintages the flagons overspill,

Dainties from lake and land are spread to please;

They split the juicy Dong Ting oranges,

Spear morsels of sweet perch from heaven's seas.

They've drunk and eaten to their heart's content:

Puffed up still more with airs, they're merry then.

This year there's drought in the south continent;

In Qu Zhou men now eat the flesh of men.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose....

Preliminary thoughts about character, national and individual

It is natural that the recent disaster in Japan should turn our thoughts toward the possibility that our own homes might be vulnerable to similar upheavals. We vainly attempt to calculate the most likely disaster scenario, imagine for a few seconds what heroic actions we might take, what route we might use to escape, what neighbor we might rescue along the way (or not). And in a few days, most of us will have successfully buried these anxious-omnipotent fantasies, reassuring ourselves that we're exceptional or that technology will save us or that there's nothing we can do anyway.  Denial, grandiosity, fatalism.

But it is worthwhile considering the hard truth that there is no place on earth that can guarantee our safety from some form of disaster—earthquake or flood, drought or famine, hurricane or tropical storm—and it's only going to get worse. Not just because we're now subject to socio-economic catastrophes with global reach (financial meltdowns, endless wars, dwindling resources) or the ravages of human greed on a grand scale (corporate pollution, misinformation promulgated for political or commercial gain). As Bill McKibben argues in Eaarth, we have created a planet that is increasingly inhospitable to life, a planet profoundly changed from the one many of us were born on. Sometimes human society itself seems inhospitable to life: abuses of power, abuses of privilege, abuses of one another....all of which are usually intimately related to the afore-mentioned financial meltdowns, wars, dwindling resources. And, while I’m delineating kinds of suffering, I might as well mention illness, which afflicts us as individuals yet can have profound consequences for people around us (and which also can result from natural disasters as well as acts of evil).

Seneca summed it up: "What need is there to weep over parts of life? The whole of it calls for tears." 

But if denial and grandiosity aren't viable options, neither is fatalism.

I’ve argued in this blog recently that we have to address problems at the level of scale at which they occur: our global environmental crisis, for example, requires coordinated responses among countries and corporations and not just individuals using less plastic. But there are, of course, appropriate responses that can take place only at the individual level. If you find yourself injured, for example: 1) you could deny it (a frequent response—at a public hospital we frequently see patients who’ve let a tumor get so large it becomes much harder to deal with, though that’s usually for lack of money rather than pushing the problem away from consciousness); 2) you could "push through the pain" (and likely injure yourself further); 3) you could collapse into a helpless heap and make everyone else around you cater to your needs; or 4) you could learn what you can about the injury and the circumstances leading to it and tend to the injured part until it heals, being particularly careful in the future to not make the same mistake.

I’m thinking response #4 reflects the healthiest approach, the one most likely to prevent further problems. But it requires knowing how to recognize an injury, having had a prior experience of being cared for and healing (thus knowing what it is to take care of the body), having a certain amout of hope and creativity in utilizing available resources, and a lot of patience, determination, and capacity for self-reflection. In a word: character.

One of the striking things about reports coming from Japan is that they regularly mention how calm and cooperative the displaced have been. The New York Times today reported:

Many Japanese have endured the privations with a similar mood of quiet stoicism, and the strong sense of community that still prevails in these northern rural areas. Even the hardest-hit areas have remained orderly and friendly, and crimes like looting are largely unheard of.

Without making too many generalizations about different cultures, I think many could agree that such communitarianism is comparatively weak in the U.S.  We live with a surfeit of information but a lack of integrity; all we seem to talk about is how to make more information available to more people (internet for everyone!), while few explore ways to enable individuals to make good use of that information. Analytic skills and understanding how to participate in a civil conversation can be shockingly absent even among professional groups.

We are, I believe, suffering the consequences of two powerful ideas combined into a distinctive political ethos: the central tenet of liberalism, which prioritizes process over substance (see Stanley Fish's provocative essay in the Times about this), and a central tenet of capitalism, which values competition.

We now habitually confuse means and ends, and our conceptions of goodness have grown dangerously thin. All that matters is winning the game, whatever the game happens to be at the moment. Is the game SAT scores? Let's teach to the test. Is the game about getting a degree? Let's plagiarize and cheat our way through school. Is the game winning an election? Let's lie about our opponent and stir up fear. Is the game about being popular? Let's talk about bipartisanship and hope no one has the audacity to remind us of the actual problems that aren't even up for discussion. Better yet, let's talk about "winning the future" and “out-educating the world” and hope no one asks what that even means.

I submit that a host of our ills reflect bad character, and that our contemporary process-oriented, competitive ethos has eroded certain conditions essential to human flourishing.  Over the course of future posts, I want to explore the notion that ethical behavior begins with attaining mastery of a practice, trade, or art—playing the piano, laying bricks, cutting hair, tending bar, raising chickens, designing gardens. I believe that through these ordinary social practices, which put us repeatedly and directly in touch with the effects of our actions, we develop a range of virtues that are necessary for our own happiness, the success of our relationships, and the health of the earth: humility, attentiveness,  self-discipline, circumspection, perseverance, sensitivity, taste, patience, perspective, connectedness... virtues that cannot arise either from the top-down application of abstract moral principles or from the practice of white-collar jobs whose express purpose is to manipulate people or money.

To be continued...

A tribute to Japan

Graphic artist Jacob Cass, of www.justcreativedesign.com, designed this tribute to Japan in response to the terrible earthquake and tsunami they have just suffered. I present it here, with permission, as an example of outstanding design and to offer a visual 'moment of silence'.

Responses to disaster: optimism as a form of resistance

Dominique Browning has done it again, with a moving post on the Japanese tsunami.

In this case, however, I was equally struck by some of the comments in response to her blog. A few responders seemed eager to cheer up Ms. Browning, who wrote of her anguish and anxiety over this catastrophe. Though I can appreciate caring individuals not wanting a friend, even a virtual one, to fall into the slough of despond, I think there is a tendency among us to be quick to "console" by urging a pollyanna-ish cheeriness. The Brits keep a stiff upper lip; we want to keep smiling. Maybe the French shrug (who knows?).

Although we do need to somehow maintain resilience in the face of catastrophes, whether natural or man-made, acute or chronic, it seems to be a strange American affliction to insist on being positive all the time. In fact, given the real world we live in, and the thorny challenges we face, it seems downright delusional. At the very least, it is inauthentic, responding to an intellectual construct of the world as opposed to the way it really is (and we know how well that works in personal relationships).

But there are consequences well beyond one's individual psyche, and this is where I find my real objection: the "stay positive" mantra isolates the sensitive among us, condemning them to shame and persecution for their realism and insight, when we should really promoting collective action and seriousness of purpose. Changes of behavior at the individual level, though important, cannot tackle political, economic, or social problems, because they exist at a different level of scale.* I cannot help but think that the Pollyannas are actually the most cynical of all, and that they are trying to fortify themselves and everyone else from falling into the black despair that otherwise is a perfectly justifiable response to so much of our self-inflicted human misery.

I am reminded of this passage from C. S. Lewis' Abolition of Man:

For every one pupil who needs to be guarded from a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity. The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts. [...] By starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes. For famished nature will be avenged and a hard heart is no infallible protection against a soft head.

Nor, I might add, is a soft head any use against hard problems. We need soft hearts, hard heads.

Barbara Ehrenreich, among others, has made a compelling argument that our relentless commitment to unrealistic optimism sowed the seeds for the banking crisis—and that an insistence on being cheerful actually leads toward a lonely focus inward and to political apathy.

So let's get serious about understanding the challenges we face, raise the level of discourse in this country, and act together to exert change. And when sensitive, intelligent people look at what's happening in various corners of the earth and express their despair, let's listen and let them irrigate our spiritual deserts.

* Consider recent events in the Arab world: after decades of abuses of power, wars, economic sanctions, and diplomatic efforts to influence the regimes, it finally took hundreds of thousands of people acting together, marching on the streets of Egypt for a month, risking life, limb, and freedom, to get rid of one measly dictator. That's the power of collective action. Speaking of which, I am inspired by Bill McKibben's creative leadership of global efforts over at 350.org to promote serious political action to address climate change.