The Dilettante's Dilemma

Individualism and Authenticity in Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice”

Posted on July 15, 2014 by hessd

“…the perturbation of Elizabeth’s feelings was every moment increasing. She was quite amazed at her own discomposure.” [1]

Even if Elizabeth Bennet were not famous as the heroine of Pride and Prejudice, this little clip would still probably be recognized by Jane Austen fans everywhere. It is just so…Austen.[2] And it isn’t just the words, although we don’t see perturbation every day and we certainly don’t see discomposure.

I am going to want to reflect a little on individualism and authenticity and there is surely no better place to start than the world of Jane Austen, where these traits are mostly ignored, denied, or deprecated. I am going to consider individualism as a process and an outcome. As a process, individualism sets a high value on the individual’s right to make unfettered choices on his or her own behalf. As an outcome, individualism sets a high value on actions that benefit the individual, at whatever cost to “others.” Here are three sample “others:” the situation, the setting, the “home team”—ordinarily, that is a family, but sometimes it takes social class into consideration.

Here is an occasion we can use as an example. Consider the expression “what the occasion required” in this passage.

“Mr. Bingley was unaffectedly civil in his answer, and forced his younger sister to be civil also, and to say what the occasion required.”[3]

This passage presumes that it is important that the requirements of “the occasion” be met. The younger sister, in this scene is not feeling all that civil and left to her own choices, she would have been uncivil. That is what she wants to do and if her desires are not to be disciplined by the needs of an external setting (the occasion, in this instance), she would be sarcastic and dismissive. Mr. Bingley looked at it differently. “What the occasion requires” is the most important thing. He is the best judge of what that is. He has the means to force his sister to comply with his judgment and does so.

The novel tells us why Mr. Bingley was being so civil, but for the purposes of this inquiry, it really doesn’t matter. If Bingley reads the situation as requiring responses of a certain kind, he will produce them and will require others who are required to accept his guidance, to produce them also. There is no individualism at all here. Nor, with an exception here and there, is there “individualism” anywhere else in Austen. There is not “anti-individualism” either. The notion that a person has a right to make his or her own judgment, to put his or her preferred outcomes first, and the needs of others, however defines, last is very seldom considered as an option at all. And when it is considered, it is considered in a negative light.

So how about “authenticity,” so beloved of modern Western cultures? Authenticity is a measure of what is inside with what is outside. We say “expressing my true feelings,” sometimes. Nearly always, in our modern consideration of it, “authenticity” is a good thing and “inauthenticity” a bad thing.

But why might one control his inner feelings? Here’s the quote with which we began.

“…the perturbation of Elizabeth’s feelings was every moment increasing. She was quite amazed at her own discomposure.”

“Composure” is organizing yourself; it is being in control first of what you feel, then of how you express yourself. Austen’s heroines know that they should be calm and composed. It’s the right way to be. In addition, losing that composure imposes costs on others that it is not fair to ask them to bear.

Her feelings are “perturbed;” they are volatile. They make her efforts at composure, difficult. Exerting the mastery of herself is the goal that is being frustrated here. When she is composed, she will feel the way she should and will be able to display the behaviors she should.

So both authenticity, the outward display of true inner feelings, and individuality, the claim that the individual, not the family or the “occasion” should be honored in the choices that are made, are not honored all that much in Austen’s fiction.

I’d like to illustrate that by looking briefly at a character for whom Austen bears nothing but contempt. It is Lydia, the youngest of the five sisters of whom Jane and Elizabeth are the oldest. Here is a way to capture what Lydia was about.

Our importance, our respectability in the world must be affected by the wild volatility, the assurance and disdain of all restraint which mark Lydia’s character. Excuse me—for I must speak plainly. If you, my dear father, will not take the trouble of checking her exuberant spirits, and of teaching her that her present pursuits are not to be the business of her life, she will soon be beyond the reach of amendment.

That is Elizabeth Bennet complaining to her father about Lydia’s character. Notice the “wild volatility.” Notice the “disdain of all restraint.” Notice the “exuberant spirits.” Except for the language that is more characteristic of Austen’s time, these could be taken as the complaints of a 19th Century woman against a 21st Century woman. In Lydia’s “exuberant spirits” and their unmitigated expression, there is no norm of composure, so there is no concern about discomposure. In the “disdain of all restraint,” we see the self-claims of a teenager against the norm of “saying what the occasion required.” These are not only bad, they are “self-evidently bad;” they are fundamentally wrong. But that means that they violate the norms of Austen’s society. If we begin, as our own time does, with the presuppositions of individualism and the demands for authenticity, Elizabeth would have no criticism to make.

What do we see here? Lydia is fifteen years old. She does not understand that “her present pursuits are not to be the business of her life.” We would call her behavior “age appropriate” and pass on. We might even work up some concern if she did not show the errors she is not showing. Elizabeth might as well say that Lydia is star-struck by some contemporary rock group and wants nothing more than to go to their concerts and listen to their music at all hours. Elizabeth might say the Lydia does not understand that being a rock band groupie is not really a career and her father’s job is to tell her the hard truth.

We would have no trouble, I am sure, with Lydia’s “exuberant spirits.” Exuberant is good; “control” of the kind Elizabeth Bennet and Jane Austen would prefer is just repression and why, after all, would you want to restrain the honest exuberance of a high-spirited young girl?

The “disdain of all restraint” seems dreadful to Elizabeth, but we, in our modern time, can see it as a refreshing strength of character, preferring her own judgment to the prejudices of others. How is she to develop her cherished authenticity if she accepts the judgments of others over her sense of her own preferences?

So what are we to conclude? Lydia, the butt of all the family complaints, is just a modern woman. She might not be the woman we would like best, but she is, very likely, the woman about whose attitudes and behavior we would feel we had no right to object. So Lydia is not really the empty headed girl Austen complains about. Lydia is really just a Valley Girl, placed in a novel several centuries too early.

[1] All quotations are from the 3rd edition of the Norton Critical Edition of Pride and Prejudice. This one is on page 169 of that edition.”
[2] I am struggling to avoid saying that it is Austentaceous. Please help me.
[3] Page 31.

Posted in Books, Movies, sociability | Tagged authenticity, composure, individualism, Jane Austen, Lydia Bennet, Pride and Prejudice | Leave a comment

Should Germans read “Mein Kampf”?

Posted on July 11, 2014 by hessd

I learned from this article in the New York Times that Germany has been officially suppressing Mein Kampf since German government was reconstituted after World War II. I’m sure that doesn’t mean that the full text isn’t available online. But the copyright expires at the end of next year and when it does, anyone can publish it and you can be sure someone will.

So…now what? Peter Range thinks that Germans really shouldn’t get up tight about the whole thing.

But while the prospect of the Führer’s words circulating freely on the German market may shock some, it shouldn’t. The inoculation of a younger generation against the Nazi bacillus is better served by open confrontation with Hitler’s words than by keeping his reviled tract in the shadows of illegality.

Inoculation is certainly one of the possible effects. Another is for deeply frustrated Germans to find in Hitler’s promises just the kind of rhetoric that will focus their fears and steel their wills. That is, after all, what happened last time.

“Inoculation” sounds to me very much like Justice Holmes’ “the test of the marketplace.”[1] Inoculation works by summoning the body’s natural defenses to defeat a mild threat. There are no “pro-smallpox” organizations in your body who will collect the virus you introduce and greatly amplify its effect and if there were little “pro-smallpox” clusters, inoculation would be incredibly risky.

And it turns out that in society—in “the body politic”–there actually are such clusters. There are regions, classes, and groups that will welcome the “virus,” that will take the teachings of Mein Kampf and urge that they be put into practice. That means that the discussions that are most likely to occur are between ardent proponents, on the one side, and representatives of the status quo on the other.

Why? The publication of Mein Kampf will cause changes along two dimensions. The first may be called “salience.”[2] The questions that so urgently engaged Hitler will rise in importance. They will be debated where they were ignored or suppressed before. They will appear in magazines and on talk shows that would not have included them before. That means that Germans who would rather not talk about it will have an issue to deal with because the new salience of Mein Kampf means that the question will no longer be whether to talk about it, but what to say about it.

The second dimension is often called “direction.” It refers to the positive or negative effects of the new prominence. The direction may be pro or con; positive or negative. One result of the new discussions—certainly the result Peter Range is hoping for—may be a contemporary rejection of Hitlerism and all it ever stood for. The publication is a “crisis,” a decision point, and in this scenario, the arguments of Hitler are rejected by a new generation of Germans who had never faced this particular argument before. Are there really Untermenschen? Are Aryans a legitimate racial category? Is Hitler a “World-Historical Individual,” to use a category Hegel provided, and therefore justified in writing his own rules. Does Germany “deserve” Lebensraum and because of that is justified in taking it by force?

These are central contentions of Mein Kampf and Range’s argument is that they should be confronted by each new generation of Germans and rejected over and over again.[3] I’d like to see that and, frankly, I don’t think there is an alternative, but I think we need to take seriously the possibility that the direction is going to be negative, rather than positive. In this scenario, many Germans would respond to the newly salient arguments by embracing them. If they are prevented from electing representatives who will express their views, they will take their argument to the streets and do it the way Hitler did it.

So I come down on the same side of the immediate issue as Range. The book should be published and the discussion should be allowed. There should be a “free marketplace of ideas” in which some win and others lose. But a “free marketplace” doesn’t happen by itself and distorted marketplaces do. Actual marketplaces very often are not “pure” markets; they are alloyed with fraud, deception, monopolistic domination, and physical or legal coercion.

If there is going to be a market in the ideas of Nazism, competitors will have to be willing to come into that market and compete and most of the new competitors will have to be drawn from categories of people who would rather the issue had not arisen at all. They will be inclined to argue for balance among views, for the historical setting of these rhetorical flourishes, and for a general sense that we have “moved past that.” They will be up against people with flame in their eyes and grievances in their hearts. No one has moved past the grievances and they will not take kindly to being told that their anger should be expressed in politically correct forms.

Really awful things are going to be said in public about Untermenschen. Since Hitler’s time, quite a few Untermenschen have been invited to Germany under a “guest workers” program. The question of whether they are “really German” has been raised both by the workers, many of them Turkish, and by other Germans whose ancestry is more clearly local. So far as I know, no one wants that discussion, but I see it becoming topical once again as Mein Kampf is discussed in its newly published versions.

In the end, I’m on Range’s side. This is a discussion that cannot be indefinitely delayed. Each new generation needs to see it and hear it and talk about it. Some will fight about it, but that cannot be helped. Pretending that this text never had an ardent and effective audience will not work.

[1] Dissenting in Abrams v. United States, Justice Holmes proclaimed that “the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.” So says Thomas Wuil Joo, of the University of California at Davis, who concludes, “Economic markets thus provide a poor analogy for the deregulation of speech.”
[2] The Latin root, salire, means “to jump” and that is captured by the expression “it jumped out at me” to refer to a salient passage.
[3] Thomas Jefferson felt the same way about constitutions, by the way. His idea that there should be a new governing document every twenty years was based on the notion that the debates on one generation should not bind the next; that every generation—hence the twenty years—has the right to have its own debate and reach its own conclusions.

Posted in Books, Paying Attention, Politics | Tagged Germany, guest workers, Hitler, Mein Kampf, the marketplace of ideas | 6 Comments

Gideon in the Land of Oz

Posted on July 5, 2014 by hessd

I know of a distressingly bad senior center called Lakeview. It is losing money; it has already cut costs; the owner is a bully; the doctor is a wimp; the residents live pathetically limited lives. What they really need is for someone to swoop in and save them from themselves and that is exactly what happens. The new resident is a superhero. Of sorts. He is in his mid-forties. Illiterate. Somewhere on the autism scale. And dying pretty fast. With those resources, I’d say he is perfect for the job.

The movie is called Gideon. No one ever says why it is called that. The main character is Gideon Dobbs (Christopher Lambert), but I think they probably have Gideon, the Israelite judge in mind.[1] These old people are oppressed by the forces of Midian, so to speak, and Gideon delivers them. How he delivers them and in just what sense he delivers them are what the story is about.

Here are two ways to look at it. Coleman Walker[2] is the only major black character. He serves Lakeview as a general handyman and is one of the best drawn characters in the movie.

Coleman Walker:       You know Gideon, I like the way you look out for Addison and the others.

Gideon:                       I like them very much.

Coleman Walker:       You certainly have given them something, I’ll tell you that much.

Gideon:                       I have?

Coleman Walker:       Yeah. Dignity.

I like that assessment for what it says about Coleman Walker. As a black man in a white world, he knows how crucially important dignity is and he is not saying that Gideon grants the residents dignity. He is saying that they have come to accept dignity as integral to their lives as a result of Gideon’s living there. Dignity is a precious commodity in a senior center, even a good one, and Lakeview is not a good one.

Addison Sinclair (Charlton Heston), a retired philosophy professor, sees the same thing another way.

Anyone who talked to Gideon knew he was being heard.

“Being really heard” meant a great deal to a retired professor. He didn’t mean that he appreciated Gideon because Gideon was willing to listen to him particularly. He meant that he appreciated Gideon because Gideon listened to everyone. And because Gideon wasn’t always preparing his next line, he heard more than other people did and saw more as well. But of all the truths Addison could have cited, he chose the one that was central to his own life, just as Coleman Walker did.

Gideon is a nice person. There’s no reason to say he was not. But his great strength, apart from his autism, was that he knew he was dying and had no interests at all apart from investing himself in the lives of the other residents. The residents are severely stereotyped. That is the charm of the film. In dealing with Addison Sinclair, who was once a professor of philosophy and seems never to have gotten over it, Gideon is dealing with the whole class of people who parade the appearance of knowledge rather than actually living their lives. Apologies to any professors of philosophy. I am illustrating what I mean by “stereotype.”

As a result of this stereotyping, there is an odd Wizard of Oz feel to the story.

Cowardly Lion: Harland Greer (Mike Connors) was once a boxer. “Having once been a boxer” is really all that matters to him. He faced physical danger with courage, once upon a time, but the courage has deserted him and he is now a patsy for nearly anyone, including Mrs. Willows (Shelley Winters), the co-owner of the facility and Billy Ray Turner, a local bully. Harland is the Cowardly Lion. Through Gideon’s intervention, he stands up to both bullies and, since that is his one flaw, overcoming it makes him a Whole Man.

Tin Man: Addison Sinclair has no heart. He is the local Tin Man. He is seriously in love with Elly, who respects Addison and is head over heels in love with love, but he cannot bring himself to say so. Gideon rigs the search for a lost resident so that Addison discovers her—he is a hero—and pushes Addison very directly to confess his love to Elly. Addison tries and fails until Gideon’s death. Then he succeeds.

Scarecrow: It is not quite fair to say that Sarah (Barbara Bain) has no brain, but she does have serious lapses of memory and is quite confused. Gideon can’t give her a brain, of course, but he does make up a set of cards for her to wear on her wrist—not a bad trick for an illiterate man—and the cards tell her her room number and the meal times and when her TV shows are on. It is all that can be done for her and it is Gideon who sees the need for it and who finds a way to make it happen.

Gideon, of course, is Dorothy.[3] He knows when he shows up at the senior center that he has leukemia and will not live long. There is no theology at all in the movie—it’s a theological pot luck; you are all invited to bring your own and something to share. If there were a theological perspective, I would recommend that it offer the parallel that Gideon, like Dorothy, only wants to go home and, in the end, does.

Another way to appreciate Gideon’s ministry is to look at the last scene by itself. Look carefully. There is no dialogue at all; just a soft musical score. Richard Willows (Taylor Nichols), the wimp doctor, and Jeanne MacLemore (Crystal Bernard), his beloved, sit quietly together on the patio. Leo Barnes (Carroll O’Connor), formerly only a curmudgeon, passes hors d’oeurvres among the guests bidding each bon appetit. Addison and Elly, to whom Addison has finally confessed his love, sit at another table, obviously in love and oblivious to others. Harland, who has overcome his cowardice and has acted bravely for the first time in a long time, sits with his hands out holding the yarn that Sarah, who struggles to remember when her programs are on and where her room is, knits the yarn.

Every sign of health and happiness we see is Gideon’s work. Our illiterate, autistic, terminally ill superhero. It’s tempting to ask just how hard can it be if Gideon can do it. But if you have tried, you know how hard it is, and it is a pleasure to see it done so well.

[1] Rather than, say, Clarence Earl Gideon, hero of Anthony Lewis’s book Gideon’s Trumpet and played memorably by Henry Fonda in the movie.
[2] “Coleman Walker” is played by Mykelti Williamson and is always called that: Coleman Walker. It’s a little bit of an inside joke. Gideon addresses everyone he meets in exactly the form the introduction took. Elly Morton (Shirley Jones) does the introductions when Gideon first arrives and calls everyone by his first name. So Gideon calls everyone by his first name. Coleman Walker introduces himself, in a later scene, and give both names. Gideon, whose great strength is remembering everything he hears exactly as he heard it, calls him by both names. Always.
[3] Or Theodore. Dorothy and Theodore both mean “gift of God.” All you have to do is switch the syllables.

Posted in Getting Old, Movies, Paying Attention | Tagged being truly heard, dignity, Gideon, movies, senior centers, stereotyping, Wizard of Oz | 3 Comments

Divergent: What the un-society looks like

Posted on July 5, 2014 by hessd

It is a really good idea to keep an eye on what you are for. Otherwise, you will make important decisions based only on what you are against. Ordinarily, that doesn’t work out well. It doesn’t work out well for persons, for societies, for nation-states. It’s just a bad idea.

That brings me to Divergent, the book and the movie. Not my kind of book or movie, I will say. It is a coming of age in a post-apocalyptic society movie. I have done all the coming of age movies I will ever need, but I have an abiding interest in post-apocalyptic societies and this one is set in Chicago after something really bad happens. We don’t find out what. What we do find out is how the resultant society has organized itself and why.

And that’s why it matters to me. My entire academic life has been spent wondering how people explain the causes of events and in looking at the effects those explanations have. Since this process involves attributing causes to events, we call it causal attribution. So…was the test really too hard or did you not prepare adequately? To which of these potential “causes” will you attribute the outcome? Were you driving too fast or is the speed limit set unconscionably low? Your choice again. Is she really as generous as she seems or is she “doing the right” thing as long as she needs to?

Causal attribution. Obviously, in these three examples, you would want to remedy the difficulty by doing one thing or the other. You would be guided by what you thought best explained the cause of the difficulty. There is a major flaw in proceeding that way, because it imagines that dealing with the cause of any particular failure is the best thing to do. Often there are better things to do, but we’ll have to pass that one by for today.

The movie, Divergent, doesn’t say how the five factions that make up their society were formed; it just says what they were. The book, however, says why they were formed and at this point in the essay, you will not be surprised to learn that each faction is based on a different causal attribution.

Decades ago our ancestors realized that it is not political ideology, religious belief, race, or nationalism that is to blame for a warring world. Rather, they determined that it was the fault of human personality—of humankind’s inclination toward evil, in whatever form that is. They divided into factions that sought to eradicate those qualities they believed responsible for the world’s disarray.

Notice the negative orientation already. Some qualities have been bad and they need to be “eradicated,” i.e., uprooted. If you do bad things to these bad traits, all will be well? Really, how likely is that?

And each faction has a positive sounding name, as if this virtue is to be the cohesive force of that faction. It isn’t true, though. Each faction is united by what they reject. And, of course, they reject different things.

Those who blamed aggression formed [the faction named] Amity. Those who blamed ignorance became Erudite. Those who blamed duplicity created Candor. Those who blamed selfishness made Abnegation. And those who blamed cowardice were the Dauntless.

If they were really factions organized to pursue those virtues, they could be called –note the new order— amity, candor, abnegation, dauntless, erudite.[1] But they are not. “Amity” should really be called Nonaggression. “Candor” should be non-duplicity. “Abnegation” should be unselfishness. “Dauntless” should be un-cowardice. “Erudite” should be un-ignorance. If it is really true that they are given over to blaming the negative traits and to explaining how their earlier society came to grief, they really should use those ugly names.

That wouldn’t make the story better, but I think it might help readers/viewers ask how factions formed by the principle these are will know when they are done. If being “dauntless” means only “refusing to be daunted,” then the faction will not be daunted, even when it should be.[2] It will not have the reck it should have; it will be reck-less. It will not know when to stop. It will not know when the welfare of the whole will be improved by adding more knowledge, rather than more bravery. It will be a guided missile with no target. I don’t think that sounds promising.

That is the end of the reflection I had in mind. I should be done now and so should you. But that last line about “a guided missile with no target” sounded very familiar to me and after a little thought, I realized that it sounded to me like the Tea Party. The Tea Party—more precisely, the Tea Party faction of the Republican party—is a faction like the ones in divergent. They are against things. They are –un.

They are un-Democratic, certainly. The Democrats spend too much money here at home and favor higher taxes so they can afford it. They are un-Republican, for sure. Primary after primary, the Republican candidate has had to argue that there should be bipartisan debate in Congress, which will require that there be Republicans in Congress. The Tea Party has said no. There is no question that they are un-conservative. They are a party of national nostalgia in the Ozzie and Harriet sense and in the Horatio Alger sense, but they are not trying to conserve anything. They are un-liberals too, in most senses. Sometimes there is a libertarian moment that attracts a Democrat’s attention, but it is very narrow and the votes aren’t there.

The Tea Party is a faction, like the un-Cowardice and the un-Ignorance factions. If you see the movie, you’ll see the connection.

[1] The new order comes very very close to the acronym ACEDIA, missing only the I. That would be cool, because it would spell acedia. The Greek form is acedia, “heedlessness.” The drivenness away from the negative value is just what the Greek word has in mind and it gets even better in German, where it is kin to the Old High German rocha, “care,” which becomes reck in English, and then reckless.

[2] We tend to say indomitable, taking it straight from the Latin verb domitare. The daunt- form comes from Latin to English through the Old French.

Posted in Books, Movies, Political Psychology, Politics | Tagged attraction, causal attribution, Divergent, fanaticism, post-apocalyptic societies, repulsion | Leave a comment

The Fault in Our Stars

Posted on June 30, 2014 by hessd

When you are dying of cancer, the question of what, really, is the point of living, becomes pressing. John Green has written a really good book about that dilemma. It is called The Fault in Our Stars.[1] Hazel Grace Lancaster, the protagonist, is probably dying of cancer. Certainly, she is living with cancer. She sees herself mostly as one of the side effects of the cancer she has.

That is what she needs to get over. The cancer will do what it will do, but she needs to get over seeing herself as one of its side effects. The paths she follows in getting over it is what the book is really about. Two are central to this story. The first is that Hazel Grace’s parents are bound tightly to her cancer. If Hazel’s life is an expression of her illness, then her parents’ lives are an expression of the expression of Hazel’s illness. They are, as Hazel sees them, “parents of a cancer kid.” Not more; not other. They orbit Hazel’s illness like satellites.

The second is an extraordinary love affair with Augustus Waters, another cancer kid. Those two sets of relationships twine around each other like DNA and give palpable life to the narrative . The relationship with the parents is the more complicated one, so I am going to deal with Augustus first. His relationship with Hazel has all the advantages of being a love story and we already know how to do those.

Augustus is, as I said, a “cancer kid” like Hazel Grace except he is unlike her in one very important respect: dying of cancer –or whatever he is doing—doesn’t seem to take all his time. He believes, mistakenly as it turns out, that his cancer is a part of his past. He had to give up a leg to get rid of the cancer, he thinks, but now he is rid of it. But that’s not really the amazing thing about Augustus. The amazing thing is that he would use all the energy he has to live as fully as he can and, from the time he meets Hazel Grace, in Chapter 1, that means using energy to be with her.

Finding herself attractive to a genuinely hot boy like Gus brings Hazel Grace out of the funk she is in when we meet her. If you have even a little extra oxygen, it is fun to use it flirting with a boy you like and admire and who is flirting with you almost full time. But Hazel Grace moves out of the funk phase into “the grenade phase,” which, as you will readily imagine, is a lot more volatile.

The grenade metaphor captures her sense that she is going to “blow up” and she will cause awful and useless damage to anyone she is with. As she sees it, her parents and her boyfriend will be exit wounds and very little more. The reality of her situation is that her parents want to be with her and so does August Waters. The answer to the question, “So…now what?” is the plot of this book.

Here’s an early introduction to Hazel. On the night she meets Gus, she goes to his house to watch a movie. Gus’s mother invites her to stay for dinner. Hazels responds:

“I guess?” I said. “I have to be home by ten. Also I don’t, um, eat meat?”

“No problem. We’ll vegetarianize some,” she said.

“Animals are just too cute?” Gus asked.

“I want to minimize the number of deaths I am responsible for,” I said.

That’s a byproduct of the cancer, as is nearly everything else in her life. “Minimize the deaths I am responsible for” is her generalized way of dealing with her parents and her former classmates. The classmates, Hazel says, “wanted to help me through my cancer, but they eventually found out that they couldn’t. For one thing, there was no through.”

That’s the problem with cancer. There is no through. She continues to relate to Gus’s friend, Isaac. Isaac had a super-hot girlfriend, Monica, but when they took Isaac’s second eye, leaving him totally blind, Monica dropped him. Hazel doesn’t have any trouble relating to the kids she knows who are dying of cancer. Here are Hazel and Isaac.

“Support Group Hazel not Monica,” I said when he got close enough, and he smiled and said, “Hey, Hazel. How’s it going?”

“Good. I’ve gotten really hot since you went blind.”

On the other hand, she and Gus both know that there is an insistent stereotyping of kids who are dying of cancer. Notice all the capital letters.

Gus: “The thing about dead people,” he said, and then stopped himself. “The thing is you sound like a bastard if you don’t romanticize them, but the truth is complicated, I guess. Like, you are familiar with the trope of the stoic and determined cancer victim who heroically fights her cancer with inhuman strength and never complains or stops smiling even at the very end, etcetera?”

Hazel: “Indeed,” I said. “They are kindhearted and generous souls whose every breath is an Inspiration to Us All. They’re so strong! We admire them so!”

Hazel gets beyond her fears of being a “grenade.” Oddly, it’s easier with Augustus than it is with her parents. August is hot and he loves Hazel. That makes everything easier. And he is not persistently misrepresenting himself to her (as her parents are) and that makes things easier too.

Gus does not die without arranging an early funeral—one that he gets to attend. It is at this service that Hazel gets to say what she wants to say about the relationship.

“My name is Hazel. Augustus Waters was the great star-crossed love of my life. Ours was an epic love story, and I won’t be able to get more than a sentence into it without disappearing into a puddle of tears. Gus knew. Gus knows. I will not tell you our love story, because—like all real love stories—it will die with us, as it should.

At the public funeral, she puts it differently. Had Gus been there, he and Hazel would have caught each other’s eye and stifled smiles. But Gus is gone and Hazel has begun to understand something about funerals.

“There’s a great quote in Gus’s house, one that both he and I found very comforting: Without pain, we couldn’t know joy.” I went on spouting bullshit Encouragements[2] as Gus’s parents, arm in arm, hugged each other and nodded at every word. Funerals, I had decided, are for the living.”

I think that’s a great place to end the Augustus and Hazel Grace part of the story. Notice that she was willing to “go on spouting bullshit Encouragements” at the public funeral—not the one Gus planned for himself, but the one Gus’s parents planned for him. And the reason? Funerals are for the living. Hazel is not willing to superimpose on the funeral Gus’s parents planned, the wary irony that has sustained her sickness-dominated life. The bullshit she offers is her gift to Gus’s parents; the only thing she can still do for Gus. Gus would understand perfectly and would applaud her.

Hazel and her parents are a tougher problem. Hazel and Gus understood their illnesses in a similar way and tried not to deceive each other. That’s not the case with Hazel and her parents. The parents’ job is exhausting and difficult. They need to make it seem that nothing in their lives is more important that maintaining their daughter’s access to oxygen and, when necessary, getting the fluid pumped out of her lungs so she can breathe. And, simultaneously, to find a way to keep off of their daughter the pressure that their perpetual martyrdom applies. “You are all that makes our lives worth living, sweetheart, but please don’t allow the pressure of that sacrifice to distort your life.” Right! Good luck with that. Here, by the way is Laura Dern as Hazel’s mother–one of the highlights of the movie version.

Here is a small piece of the dilemma in Hazel’s voice:

It occurred to me that the reason my parents had no money was me. I’d sapped the family savings with Phalanxifor copays, and Mom couldn’t work because she had taken on the full-time profession of Hovering Over Me. I didn’t want to put them even further into debt.

But even this works its way out. This is what that looks like.

“I want you guys to have a life,” I said. “I worry that you won’t have a life, that you’ll sit around here all day with no me to look after and stare at the walls and want to off yourselves.”

After a minute, Mom said, “I’m taking some classes. Online, through IU. To get my master’s in social work. In fact, I wasn’t looking at antioxidant recipes; I was writing a paper.”

“Seriously?”

“I don’t want you to think I’m imagining a world without you. But if I get my MSW, I can counsel families in crisis or lead groups dealing with illness in their families or—”

“No, this is great. This is fantastic!” I was really smiling.

It took some digging and some anger and tears to get down to the place where these few things could be said, but when they all got there. “I don’t want you to think I am imagining a world without you. But…I’m taking some classes…to get my master’s in social work.”

Hazel’s response is completely wholehearted. She wishes them a whole and healthy life after she has died and they are willing to accept the gift. Hazel is not, here, the “cancer kid, “whose every breath is an Inspiration to Us All.” Those capitals represent the irony that she and Augustus practiced. And her parents are not the parents of Hazel’s nightmare, having “taken on the full-time profession of Hovering Over Me.” The capitals again.

Not anymore. The parents have moved on. The daughter has granted them the right to stop Hovering Over Her and they have accepted with gratitude. She’s still going to die, but she made sure to take this time to live. Good for you, Hazel Grace.

[1] I regret to say that there is a movie version, which is really very little more than a teenage romance between kids who are dying of cancer.
[2] “Encouragements” is capitalized because there are lots up uplifting sayings at Gus’s house and his mother calls them “Encouragements” with a capital E-.

Posted in Books | Tagged cancer, cancer kids, falling in love, living in a buffer, the Fault in Our Stars | Leave a comment

Stereotyping

Posted on June 28, 2014 by hessd

One of my favorite introductions to a topic comes from Tom Lehrer’s song, “Smut.” “I do have a cause though,” he says, “Smut…I’m for it.” That little ellipsis gives you a chance to imagine why he hates smut so much to have written a song about it or to anticipate how much smut he can work into a song that is purportedly against smut. Nothing prepares you for: I have a cause…smut…I’m for it.

So I have a cause: stereotyping. I’m for it.

I’m not for all the uses of it I have seen, of course, but we are hard-wired for it. It is completely inescapable as a general mechanism for responding to our world and it doesn’t make much sense to be against it. Stereotyping is the practice of seeing an individual as an instance of a category. That’s it.

Stereotyping allows you to give the benefit of the doubt to someone you don’t even know. On the bus I used to take to work, there was a sign that said, “These seats reserved for honored [old] citizens.” So a young woman with two children and three bags of groceries stands, while I sit because I am old? A young man with new crutches stands while I sit because I am old and he is not? I get a slower paced pitch from organizations I have donated to before because the caller reads on the computer screen that I am in my mid-70s?

Yes. All those are instances of stereotyping, i.e., they are cases in which actual persons are treated as if they were instances of categories. The categories are formed, of course, because they unite common elements, such as old = frail.

Stereotyping isn’t a good thing or a bad thing. It’s just a thing that can be put to good or bad uses. Hanging on to the information the category gives you, even when information about this instance of the category becomes available is just stupid. It may be generously intended but it reduces the useful information the stereotyper has to work with and that is seldom a good idea.

As the person making the judgments, I need to be alert to the ways a particular person is not typical of the category. That makes my judgments and therefore my work more effective. As the person being judged—follow the logic here; note that “judged” does not mean “condemned”—you have the responsibility to give me the information I need to treat you as the special case you are. It’s a dance. Either of us can lead; either can follow.

I’ve been spending time touring senior centers recently and over and over, I notice that everyone in a certain category is automatically given certain advantages. When some people, who are members of that category, need additional advantages, they are provided. It’s all good.

Stereotyping can be put to bad purposes as well, of course. Everything can be. If you type by gender and ignore important individual distinctions as they become available, you will have lost valuable information. And if the type is negative, you may have damaged some actual persons as well. If you type by race or age or height or religion, ditto. You lose under any circumstances and individual persons lose if the category is negatively connoted.

Stereotyping isn’t any better or any worse than discriminating. We used to take the trouble to say that we were against “invidious discriminations.” Those are distinctions tending to produce a sentiment for which the Latin noun is invidia or ill will. Of course. But we have stopped taking the time to say “invidious discriminations” and now we purport to be against “discrimination” as if the inability to tell a pinot noir from a cabernet sauvignon were somehow a virtue.

Discrimination just means being able to tell one from another. Stereotyping just means treating instances of a category alike until further information is available. Honestly, I can’t see why we make such trouble for ourselves.

Posted in Getting Old, Living My Life, Society, Words | Tagged criminals, discrimination, Matrix, old people, stereotyping | Leave a comment

The Wild Wild West (Bank)

Posted on June 22, 2014 by hessd

Yesterday, June 20, four Presbyterians at the church’s annual national meeting, voted for divestiture. Had they not, the church’s motion would have failed again—as it did last year, by two votes—but because they did, it passed this year by seven votes. The proponents of this measure, which pulls funds the Presbyterian Church controls away from Caterpillar, Hewlett-Packard and Motorola Solutions, managed to gain nine votes in the 12 months since their previous failure. That’s better than a vote per month; you have to give them credit for slow but steady progress.

This action by the Presbyterian Church U. S. A.[1] has been opposed for a lot of reasons. Here are three. Some have said it is anti-Semitic; some have said it to too political for a church body; most commentators I have seen have ridiculed it as ineffective.

I have doubts about it myself, but I don’t have those particular doubts and in this essay, I would like to say why. I would also like to say that I have a red-headed sister-in-law at the General Assembly, but the redhead in this picture (far left) is not her.

“Anti-Semitic” is a statement of motive. Since I have studied motives carefully for the last forty years or so, I feel that I have the right to say that I have lost faith in them. I stop listening immediately to anyone who says that “the motive” for an action was something; anything. I don’t believe in actions taken for one motive and if I did, I would not believe that the actor was likely to know what that motive was. What is my (one) motive for writing this piece?

So I don’t take the charge of anti-Semitism seriously in this context on the grounds that it is an assertion no one can support. It’s also harder to talk about the motives of political groups. Does the U. S. have “a motive” for opposing U. N. membership for Palestine? Of course not. Does Israel have “a motive” for annexing Palestinian territory? Of course not.

It is also true that just what the state of Israel ought to be doing in the West Bank (and in Islamic parts of Jerusalem) is a matter of vigorous public debate in Israel. Is the Israeli left wing “anti-Semitic?” Is it anti-Semitic when Haaretz publishes it or is it just anti-Semitic when that same editorial is published in the Seattle Times? Everyone should be free to argue that to consequences of annexing the West Bank will be good in these ways and bad in those ways and so Israel should or should not do it. Let’s just leave “anti-Semitic” aside.

Is it too political an action for a church body—even the governing body of a church—to take? No. It isn’t. I don’t think it would be out of line for the General Assembly to adopt a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry, urging him to set a limit on what are still called “the peace talks” between Israel and Palestine. We could say that we still have high hopes for “the peace process” and wish him well. We could say that we have no hope left for “the peace process”—in my view, that is Kerry’s own opinion—and that we urge him to set a time limit, after which the U. S. will remove its Security Council veto on Palestinian membership. We could say that the U. S. has no business meddling in the east end of the Mediterranean and that we think our presence there is counterproductive. The Presbyterian Church is made up almost entirely of U. S. citizens, any one of whom might write such a letter and any number of whom might urge their governing body to write such a letter. It is perfectly in keeping with the norms of public discourse in the United States. It is not too political.

The action of the General Assembly doesn’t go that far, however. It does not urge the U. S. to take some new foreign policy step. It removes our complicity, or at least some of it. The result of the vote will be to remove the $21 million of church funds that are currently invested in those three companies. The church is saying, “We don’t want our money to be used that way. Please give it back.”[2]

What argument can be made against that action? That the church is obligated to invest in companies that make the Israeli annexation of Palestinian lands easier? That doesn’t sound right.

The only one of the three arguments that I think is worth taking seriously is the third one, above, that this action by the Presbyterians doesn’t actually matter much. I think it might. It doesn’t cripple the finances of Caterpillar, Hewlett-Packard and Motorola Solutions. If those investments are financially rewarding and fairly secure, a lot of investors will fill in those dollars very quickly.

Here’s why I think it matters. Hannah Arendt, the political theorist, often talked about “the space of appearance;” sometimes “the public space of appearance.” I first heard this idea described as “the space of public appearance” and that is the phrase I will use to refer to this important idea of Arendt’s.[3] Here’s the way she describes it;

The space of appearance must be continually recreated by action; its existence is secured whenever actors gather together for the purpose of discussing and deliberating about matters of public concern, and it disappears the moment these activities cease. It is always a potential space that finds its actualization in the actions and speeches of individuals who have come together to undertake some common project.

This is my counter to the argument that the recent action of the Presbyterian Church is silly and inconsequential. We have enlarged the space of appearance for this issue by engaging in this debate. We have “actualized” the potential of this issue by engaging in the “actions and speeches of individuals who have come together to undertake some common project.”

Picture it as a way of moving a spotlight in the direction of a floodlight. As the lighted area gets larger, more people are in it. Or they have to move to get out of it. This isn’t “light” in the biblical sense, which is always true and illuminates evil. It isn’t even “light” in the sense of the “sunshine laws” which bring the dark works of government into the bright light of public attention. This is just the “light” of public attention. This is light in the sense that a sign that says: “We don’t serve genetically modified foods here” is light. It raises a question everywhere else that would not otherwise be raised. It is “light” in the sense that a sign is light that says, “We pay all our workers a living wage.”

There is no corresponding urge, on the parts of other companies, to post “counter-signs” saying “Get your genetically modified food here!” or “Yes! We do pay our employees so little that it takes federal welfare programs to help support them.” So this is not “our light” in the sense that it makes other actors feel light setting up their own lights. This is the kind of light that raises questions in places where they would not otherwise have been raised.

This “lighted area,” the area where the question of our role in Israeli foreign policy is raised, is larger as a result of this Presbyterian action. The “space of public appearance” now engages more people and more groups than it did. The question is now raised where it would not formerly have been raised.

I think that’s a good thing, but even if you don’t, you will have to admit that it is a thing. It is some thing. We have to pay attention now to things we did not have to pay attention to before and the thing about “paying” is that it engages resources that could have been used otherwise.

So for the four Presbyterian delegates whose votes broadened this space of public appearance, thank you.

[1] That’s the mainline Presbyterian Church, not any of the more conservative branches. It is also the denomination to which I belong, so when I say “we,” it is the main body of the Presbyterian Church I am referring to.
[2] You might not think that we would actually say “Please,” but, in fact, Presbyterians are notably polite. That is one of the reasons it takes us so long to make decisions.
[3] Arendt is also known for the expression “the banality of evil,” which is the way she described Adolf Eichmann’s participation in the horrors of the Holocaust. It is a phrase that cost her most of her Jewish friends and even in New York, it is hard for a Jew to be without Jewish friends.

Posted in Paying Attention, Politics | Tagged "the space of public appearance", anti-Semitism, divestiture, Hannah Arendt, Israel, meddling in politics, Palestine, Presbyterians | 2 Comments

Being “Beautiful”

Posted on June 18, 2014 by hessd

So I’m this old guy with a white beard. What would I know about being “beautiful”?

Quite a bit, actually. I don’t know how it feels to be beautiful, having…you know…never been, but I do know how it feels to play a part that is constructed and placed on you and to know two things at the same time: 1) this is not who I am and 2) I need to pretend to be this person for the sake of the people who are expecting it.

That might seem an odd connection, but it came to me as I was watching a TED talk that my step-daughter, Melisa Jaenisch, (I am a rich in step-daughters and have never ceased to benefit from it) sent to me.[1] This is Cameron Russell, who is, as you see, very attractive.[2]

In her lecture, she puts up a series of pictures of herself: the professional glamor queen on the left; the actual person on the right. The pictures on the left are remarkably similar, no matter what she is wearing. The pictures on the right show her on her soccer team, at a slumber party, with her grandmother. Just a pretty little girl. The pictures on the left were taken at the same time as the pictures on the right. The day she shot the bikini and heels shot was the same day she played soccer with her team.

About the pictures on the left, she says, “That’s not me. That’s a construct they have built using me as the base.” There are, she says, hair stylists, makeup artists, photographers, pre-production (whatever that is), and post-production (whatever that is). She knows how she can be made to appear and she has a sense of just how much of that bears on who she is. Her livelihood depends on being made to appear that way; her life requires that she know that the image is not her.

But that’s really only a part of the truth. She also tells of “buying” a dress and realizing at the last minute that she had forgotten her wallet. No problem. The store was happy to give her the dress. No pre- and post-production; no makeup artists and hair stylists. Just “how she looks.” Or the time she was riding in a car with a friend, who was pulled over by a cop. The cop looked in the window and saw Cameron Russell as the passenger and gave the driver a warning and left. No problem. No pre- and post-production; no makeup artists and hair stylists.

She could have refused the gift of the dress, but refusing the favor (to her friend) from the cop is a lot tougher and the way it is tough points to a lot of other difficulties. Men will go out of their way to do “favors” for attractive women. These may be “favors” the women would not have chosen and do not like, but they will be offered anyway, because the men are paying homage and will not be deterred. Women in that circumstance really can’t get away with saying that they aren’t attractive or that they are tired of being attractive or that they wish to have some other aspect of themselves recognized. The most socially agile women I have ever seen deal with this issue, grant the premise, express appreciation, and change the subject. If they are unable to change the subject, they leave.

The man says, in effect, “You are beautiful and I am doing this for you as a recognition of your beauty.” The woman says, in effect, “Yes I am, thank you for noticing, how ‘bout them Steelers?” Men who are socially agile catch that transaction on the first bounce. Most men seem to get it after just a few bounces. The ones who refuse to get it need to be dealt with more directly. That isn’t pretty, but it is necessary.

On the other hand, some women make a career out of being beautiful and find it more enjoyable than not. I remember a line from a movie called The Mirror Has Two Faces in which Barbra Streisand is supposed to be the ugly sister. The other sister, never shown in the movie, is supposed to be more attractive, but the mother is a beauty. She is played by Lauren Bacall, who knows how to do it, and is resented by the younger (ugly) daughter. Streisand’s character experiences a romantic catastrophe and has to move back home. At that point, thoroughly humiliated, she summons up the nerve to ask her mother, “What is it like to be beautiful?” Her mother hesitates, to see if her un-beautiful, anti-beautiful daughter is really asking the question, and then answers it. “It’s wonderful,” she says; and then says just how it is wonderful.

We can place the photographed version of Cameron Russell on one side of this construct and the personal experience of Lauren Bacall on the other. One identifies with the role and cherishes it; the other knows the role to be fraudulent, and alienates herself from it—when she can. When her friend is driving and is arrested, she overcomes her alienation and uses the resource.

I actually know a little about this myself—not, of course, because I have ever been beautiful–but I really have played a role that needed to be played and that was “not me.” I have lobbied, at the state legislature, on behalf of bills I did not believe in. I have been hired as an “inspirational speaker” at weekend retreats and have been related to in the way that people thought would be appropriate if I were “inspired.” I have pretended to be smart and knowledgeable in settings where it was either me or nobody and have graciously accepted the compliments of people who thought I pulled it off successfully. All those are “constructs” that are “put on me” and that are “not me,” but that I felt I needed to own, at least for the time being.

But those were comparatively easy. Easy? Compared to what? Compared to being the father of small children. I realize that have just divided my reading public into two groups. The first group have been fathers and know exactly what I am talking about and know I am right. The members of the second group have not had that experience themselves and think I am overdoing it a little. Or a lot. I’m fine with both of those responses. I know what I know. I know what Cameron Russell knows. There are times when you really need to be the person they think you are or the person they need you to be.

As a father of young children, you are your son’s first coach and your daughter’s first boyfriend. You know “how things are” and sometimes “why.” They see you as vastly experienced; you know people in a bewildering variety of styles; you are paid money to do things; you have authority, and should worst come to worst, power.

In a collective society, a new father moves into the phalanx of fathers. He is “one of those” and acts correctly when he acts the way they do. In an individualistic society, being a new father is all improv. It’s not that you didn’t have a father. It’s that your father succeeded (or not) by playing his part with the resources available to him. Since his time, the part has changed and you are not him and the resources you have access to are different. It’s improv. And if you are recently married, your wife has never seen you “be a father” either and, in addition, has different memories of how it should be done. Her father was, after all, her first boyfriend and she remembers what “doing it right” looked like.

But it turns out that playing any of the parts I’ve described, even the role of “father,” works the same way being an attractive woman works. You can’t deny a “truth” people are committed to. Saying that you don’t feel like that about yourself only makes you “humble” and besides, it pulls the rug out from under them. Ordinarily, people don’t like that. The only way I have ever seen it done well is by people who find the words and actions that amount to: “Yes, what you think I am it real. Thank you for noticing. How ‘bout them Steelers?”

[1] If you don’t know the short lectures available at TED.com, you have a treat coming. You can just pick one of the ones they are featuring or search by presenter or by subject. I have seen some I didn’t agree with, but I have never seen one I didn’t like.
[2] I actually save the word beautiful to refer to what an attractive woman does with her looks. It isn’t the superlative form of attractive for me. And it isn’t really a visual word for me either; it is a “generous use of a highly prized resource” word. That’s just a personal use, but it explains why I use other words when I can and why, when I do use that one, I put it in quotes.

Posted in Living My Life, Society | Tagged beautiful women, being yourself, credulous children, fathers, social constructs | Leave a comment

Peace in All Three Iraqs

Posted on June 16, 2014 by hessd

I don’t know what the Romans called the area that is now—for the next months at least—called Iraq. Just to make it easy on me, let’s say they called it “Iraq.” That brings us next door to one of the best known sentences in all of Latin literature: “Iraq est omnis divisa in partes tres.” The increasing likelihood that modern Iraq is going to be divided into three parts. According to a recent map, which Ross Douthat linked into his column today, this is what that would look like. Tucked in there between Syria on the west and Iran on the east are : Free Kurdistan, Sunni Iraq, and an Arab Shia State.

Douthat doesn’t have a perspective, in this column, at least, about what American policymakers ought to prefer in the Middle East. He is content with pointing out that there are really very few options that fall within the tradition of the projection of American power.

Here is one option.

As Jerry Muller argued in Foreign Affairs in 2008, the brutal ethnic cleansing and forced migrations that accompanied and followed the two world wars ensured that “for the most part, each nation in Europe had its own state, and each state was made up almost exclusively of a single ethnic nationality,” which in turn sapped away some of the “ethnonational aspirations and aggression” that had contributed to imperialism, fascism and Hitler’s rise. But this happened after the brutal ethnic cleansing that accompanied and followed two world wars. There’s no good reason to imagine that a redrawing of Middle Eastern borders could happen much more peacefully.

We don’t want to choose that because although we might like the end product, we want no part of the means of achieving it.

Another option is to intervene directly on the side of whoever is most likely to keep the various regions together. That’s a bad idea for a lot of reasons, one of which is that it would take a long time. The domestic political pressure against it would be severe. And, of course, the entry of an outside power tends to unify the local powers as much as is necessary to repel the “invader.” The most graphic recent example is the weapons we gave to the mujahidin in Afghanistan so they could repel “outsiders.” Then, when we invaded after 9/11, we were the outsiders and the weapons worked just as well against us as they did against the Russians.

On the other hand, it’s hard just to give it up. Whatever lack of merit the policies may have had, the cost to American soldiers was awful and it is hard to conquer real estate as such cost and then just abandon it. It must be done, but it is hard.

Douthat positions himself in the middle, not so much by proposing a way forward as by critiquing the views of others. That is perfectly appropriate; he is a columnist after all. He criticizes the Bush administration (George W, not George H. W.) for “recklessness.” He criticizes the Obama administration for “neglect.” But he comes to the present dilemma when he points out:

Now our leverage relative to the more immediate players is at a modern low point, and the progress of regional war has a momentum that U.S. airstrikes are unlikely to arrest.

Douthat just barely manages to avoid saying that the U. S. ought to have more leverage than the immediate players. Just barely. The point here is that there are people who live there and who care intensely about borders we have only recently heard about. They will kill each other over ethnic nuances that elude us entirely. Is there any reason they should not have more leverage than we do?

Oddly, all this reminds me of Abraham Lincoln’s re-entry into politics after his term as a Whig Congressman. My son, Doug, and I are listening to some really good lectures by David Zarefsky, of Northwestern University.[1] Zarefsky is really clear that Lincoln had an instinct for the center and when he couldn’t get it by defining the policy he favored, he got it the way Douthat gets it—but ridiculing his foes. Lincoln held that slavery was fundamentally wrong, but that it was constitutionally guaranteed. Lincoln’s fight was not to abolish slavery, but to contain it in the states of the old South. He rejected the slavery faction on the one side and the abolitionist faction on the other side. He may very well have argued that so far as the federal government is concerned, “our leverage relative to the more immediate players is at a modern low point.” I hope that sounds familiar.

As he was debating with Senator Douglas, he had no idea what policy would get us where we wanted to go but he was sure he wanted to preserve his options. It is that, I think, that helps me watch Douthat struggling with where we should go.

[1] Another good one by the Teaching Company: “Abraham Lincoln in His Own Words.”

Posted in Politics | Tagged Abraham Lincoln, American Empire, foreign policy, Iraq, Ross Douthat | Leave a comment

Only St. Peter Controls the Copier Codes

Posted on June 11, 2014 by hessd

According to Matthew’s account of the transaction, Jesus gave Peter the keys of the kingdom of heaven (see Chapter 16). That’s the good news. The bad news is that Bowdoin College has disabled the keys given to the Bowdoin Christian Fellowship.

This way into the subject (see the New York Times account here) is just for fun, but you have to wonder if it is really a fair trade. If it means the Rev. Robert Ives, the director of religious and spiritual life at Bowdoin, gets to determine who has access to Bowdoin and St. Peter gets to determine who, at Bowdoin, gets into heaven, you really ought to think about it. Bowdoin: Heaven. Heaven: Bowdoin. Sometimes it’s hard to choose.

OK, that was recess; let’s get back to our studies.

For forty years, roughly the amount of time the Hebrew people spent wandering in the wilderness[1], evangelicals at Bowdoin College in Maine have been “part of the school community.” Presumably that means—it is what it meant at the University of Virginia when their case came up[2]–that they receive the benefits of funding from the College and access to rooms where they can meet, just as all the other groups receive. Now, the Bowdoin Christian Fellowship has run afoul of the College’s anti-discrimination requirements.

In a collision between religious freedom and antidiscrimination policies, the student group, and its advisers, have refused to agree to the college’s demand that any student, regardless of his or her religious beliefs, should be able to run for election as a leader of any group, including the Christian association.

I read this with a certain incredulity. Hello? You don’t have to be Christian to lead the Bowdoin Christian Fellowship? Why not? Do you have to be an evolutionist to chair the biology department?

But then I thought, “Well, that’s sensible after all. Why should the College have any views about who the evangelicals should choose as their leader? If they want to elect a Buddhist, why shouldn’t they be allowed to?”

That hard-won ease lasted me two paragraphs, when I learned that:

At Cal State, the nation’s largest university system with nearly 450,000 students on 23 campuses, the chancellor is preparing this summer to withdraw official recognition from evangelical groups that are refusing to pledge not to discriminate on the basis of religion in the selection of their leaders.

As I see it, this moves on beyond the question of whether they can elect a Buddhist if they want to and gets to the question of whether they can justify failing to choose a Buddhist. Note that “I want a leader who will help this group meet its avowed objectives” is not a valid objection because it “discriminates on the basis of religion.”

I see two questions here and, as is often the case in this blog, one points this way and one points that way.

The first question has to do with the school administration’s attitude toward special interest groups. I don’t think it would violate any important principle for the administration to say that “discrimination” is perfectly acceptable if it has to do with the fundamental reason a group exists.

Some institutions, including the University of Florida, the University of Houston, the University of Minnesota and the University of Texas, have opted to exempt religious groups from nondiscrimination policies.

Presumably, this refers to discrimination about religion. I am quite sure it does not empower the religious groups to discriminate on the base of race or gender, for instance. This seems like a common sense solution to me. It grants room for freedom of religious practice to the group and it doesn’t disadvantage anyone.

The second question comes at the problem from the other side. Are there really no catacombs under Bowdoin? Why not meet there, as the early Christians did at Rome?

The students are saying that Bowdoin should let them practice their religion in peace, but what they mean is that they want to be free to practice AND to violate the non-discrimination policy AND keep their college-granted key access. This is precisely like saying that a church should be able to campaign in any way it chooses AND to keep their 501(c) (3) status with the IRS.

I would like to ask the Reid Wilson and Zachary Stur, recent members of the Christian Fellowship what they are gaining by weaning themselves from official approval and what they are losing. Let’s leave aside the question of whether the College is being fair. They are not. You already know I’m on your side of that one. So let’s move to the question of your own goals. How can you not meet in Christian fellowship and apprentice yourselves to Jesus Christ and to study God’s Word without official approval? What would you be free to do if you didn’t have to have official approval? What have you been refusing to consider because it would have cost you official approval?

This could be the best thing that ever happened to you? Can you imagine, years down the road, the administration coming to you and pleading for you to accept the College’s blessing so that you would have to stop doing what you have been able to do by not caring whether you had the College’s blessing?

I think the College is wrong. I agree with you. But really, this may be one of the best things that ever happened to you and if Jesus had waited for official approval, he would still be waiting, and so would we.

[1] And, as you will see, that might not be the only similarity.
[2] See Rosenberger v. University of Virginia, 1994. Another of the 5-4 decisions for which recent courts have become famous. If you have been following this Court, you will not be surprised that Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote the opinion.

Posted in Education, Politics | Tagged Bowdoin College, catacombs, discrimination, evangelicals | Leave a comment