modern morality
Hotel Babylon is driving me crazy. I started watching this BBC dramedy about the staff at a five star British hotel because John Barrowman is in one episode and it was free to stream on netflix. It’s pretty entertaining, too. But a couple of episodes have this strange morality. They want to make their characters complex, but also likeable, while exploring the idea that anything can happen at a hotel.
To whit:
One episode explores the reality of illegal immigrant employment in hotels. The head of the maids (a regular character) is threatened by the immigrant police with getting sent back to Australia on a outdated visa or else give up someone else and get five more months to sort it out. She is one of the more “moral” characters and plans to give up herself until she sees an African immigrant (who works in the back area as a doctor and otherwise as a janitor) beating his 17 year old daughter. So she ends up giving up the father b/c he is abusive. basically separating him and his underage daughter. It seems like this is going to be a good exploration of a complicated moral situation, except that the last scene is of the daughter hugging the head maid, making it alllll ok.
Then the last episode I watched, a whole lot of maids got fired for making extra money stripping and cleaning rooms, while high end call girls regularly walk through the front doors. And there was absolutely no discussion of this discrepancy. Just obvious moral disgust with the maids and acceptance of the call girls. We’re a society in flux and don’t know what our morals are, I suppose.
Humility
A story in the Oct 26, 2009 New Yorker, “Chinese Barbizon: Painting the Outside World” by Peter Hessler, about Chinese workers (particularly a group of painters who are commissioned to paint scenes of Europe and America that they don’t understand).
Together with her boyfriend, Chen earned about a thousand dollars every month, which is excellent in a small city. To me, her story was amazing: I couldn’t imagine coming from a poor Chinese farm, learning to paint, and finding success with scenes that were entirely foreign. But Chen took no particular pride in her accomplishment. These endeavors were so technical and specific that, at least for the workers involved, they essentially had no larger context. People who had grown up without any link to the outside world suddenly developed an extremely specialized role in the export economy; it was like taking their first view of another country through a microscope.
The Lishui experience seemed to contradict one of the supposed benefits of globalization: the notion that economic exchanges naturally led to greater understanding. But Lishui also contradicted the critics who believe that globalized links are disorienting and damaging to the workers at the far end fo teh chain. The more time I spent in the city, the more I was impressed with how comfortable people were with their jobs. They didn’t worry about who consumed their products, and very little of their self-worth seemed to be tied up in these trades. There were no illusions of control–in a place like Lishui, which combined remoteness with the immediacy of world-market demands, people accepted an element of irrationality. If a job disappeared or an opportunity dried up, workers didn’t waste time wondering why, and they moved on. Their humility helped, because they never perceived themselves as being the center of the world. When Chen Meizi had chosen her specialty, she didn’t expect to find a job that matched her abilities; she expected to find new abilities that matched the available jobs. The fact that her vocation was completely removed from her personality and her past was no more disorienting than the scenes she painted–if anything it simplified things. She couldn’t tell the difference between a foreign factory and a farm, but it didn’t matter. The mirror’s reflection allowed her to focus on details; she never lost herself in the larger scene.
The author also quotes a fascinating story about Jesus as a Taoist figure. The moral of the story is that we should not try to change the world. So different from my own personality and understanding of the world and yet so fascinating.
With the fervor of a young aspiring poet, I obsessed over the question, “What does God think of art?” Meaning, is it possible to be a righteous servant of God if you are more interested in the writings of Shakespeare, Austen and Woolf than those of the Mormon founder Joseph Smith? I was pretty sure the answer was no, and I was unhappy about it.
Whoot!
I’ll actually be in NYC for this! A sci-fi themed Studio 360. What could be better? (Well, all the other amazing things I have planned for the trip…some of which is hush hush).
And on a different sci-fi note, “Studio 360″ is planning its first ever live show in WNYC’s Greene Space on November 17, and it’s about time. The time travel-themed show will feature astrophysicist David Goldberg and forward-thinking funk singer Janelle Monae (along with her alter-ego Cindi Mayweather). We’ll broadcast the show later in the year, so you’ll literally be glimpsing into the future by joining us: tickets info here.
Despair
I have certainly felt spiritual despair during my journey of clinical depression. Sometimes my psychiatrist and different therapists pass this off as a part of the depression. Not knowing if there is a God or how to relate to Him/Her; not knowing if I am acting in a moral way; not knowing if my life can ever make a difference. Certainly those feelings contribute to the feelings that life doesn’t matter and uselessness that are hallmarks of a clinical depression diagnosis. But I hesitate to say they are the same.
I hadn’t thought it through very much until just now when I saw this NY Times op-ed piece bringing up Kierkegaard’s opinions on despair. I was ready to reject it at first because of it’s flippant comment about our society’s dependence upon Prosac (one wonders if the people who say these things have ever been through depression or its treatment. The drugs are certainly no magic pill that flips a switch on your mood. They just make your mood more manageable). But further in it gets interesting.
despair according to Kierkegaard is a lack of awareness of being a self or spirit. A Freud with religious categories up his sleeves, the lyrical philosopher emphasized that the self is a slice of eternity. While depression involves heavy burdensome feelings, despair is not correlated with any particular set of emotions but is instead marked by a desire to get rid of the self, or put another way, by an unwillingness to become who you fundamentally are. This unwillingness often takes the form of flat out wanting to be someone else. Kierkegaard writes: ‘An individual in despair despairs over something. … In despairing over something, he really despaired over himself, and now he wants to be rid of himself. For example, when the ambitious man whose slogan is “Either Caesar or nothing” does not get to be Caesar, he despairs over it … precisely because he did not get to be Caesar, he cannot bear to be himself.’
Oh God, how many times since childhood have I wished to be someone else. I cannot even imagine numbering them. Like the sands of the sea, made all the worse by the end of childhood and realizing that the dreams that seemed remotely possible no longer are…”Either Emma Thompson or nothing.”
Again, for Kierkegaard, despair is not a feeling, but an attitude, a posture towards ourselves. The man who did not become Caesar, the applicant refused by medical school, all experience profound disappointment. But the spiritual travails only begin when that chagrin consumes the awareness that we are something more than our emotions and projects. Does the depressive identify himself completely with his melancholy? Has the never ending blizzard of inexplicable sad thoughts caused him to give up on himself, and to see his suffering as a kind of fever without significance? If so, Kierkegaard would bid him to consider a spiritual consultation on his despair, to go along with his trip to the mental health clinic.
Pink Boys
Check out this sweet description of how a mother learned from her son about self confidence.
At that morning’s drop-off, my confidence in Sam moved up a notch when he announced to his teacher, “Look at my pretty dress! No one is allowed to make fun of me.”
After school, Sam beamed as he reported that his teachers had said they liked his dress, and the other 4-year-olds had said he looked pretty. But the kids in the 5-year-old class had teased him and told him that he was “girly,” that “boys can’t wear dresses,” and that he “must not be a boy.”
“What did you say back?” I asked, hiding my trepidation behind an encouraging smile.
“I said, ‘Don’t make fun of me! I can be a boy and wear a dress, because it is my choice!’”
AND the way another parent reacted:
And how did I feel about the experiment? Well, next week is tie-dye week at school. The class parent in charge of ordering the clothes (T-shirts for the boys, dresses for the girls) called to ask if I wanted a T-shirt or a dress for Sam. Touched by her thoughtfulness, I thought I would give Sam the same consideration she had, so I let him decide.
It looks like there will soon be two dresses in Sam’s closet.
race relations…and “white” perspectives
If I had written this post last night when I wanted to, it would have come out much more freaked out. So for the authentic emotional experience, imagine my voice progressively rising in pitch and volume throughout this piece.
I had a marathon play experience yesterday. The Theater Department put on Palmer Park, a play about integration in Detroit following the Detroit Race Riots written semi-autobiographically by a white Canadian woman. She gave a pre-play talk, which I attended with my advisor, then we broke for dinner, then the play, then a post play discussion which included two black professors from the history department, one of the black actors, and the white director and dramaturg.
Part of the reason I was interested in the play was because I had picked up a copy of it last year at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival (where it was first performed). I thought then, and to some extent still think, that it is an interesting, complex discussion of race relations. Certainly more so than the play I lambasted here a few months back. Unlike that one, which truly seemed to a rise just from a liberal guilt sense of including a black person for the pure sake of diversity (read tokenism), this play arose out of the playwright’s own experiences, one of which was this clash between the middle class blacks of her neighborhood and lower class blacks across the street. The play centers around a group of parents trying to keep their school integrated because integration of the middle class kept resources in the school. And this is a moral question I perennially think about…parents make moral decisions based on the best circumstances for their own children which in aggregate often create many social problems (like the incredible re-segregation now present in our country). But even as I write that, I need to emphasize–segregation isn’t necessarily a problem unless it is accompanied by discriminatory social services.
So like I sometimes do, I was listening for the interesting portions of the playwright’s pre-play talk. I heard her equate integration with good education (the heavy implication being than an all black school was necessarily a failing school). She mentioned the economic differences between many of these communities, where, for example, in one school district of Chicago they spend $800 a year on a student and in another they spend $17,000. But that’s not the first thing I mentioned when I turned to my advisor after the talk (I mentioned the interesting class discussion). He did mention the way she equated good with integrated, and I felt like an idiot. One of the legacies of the way we teach and discuss Brown v. Board of Education in this country is the assumption of many whites that “integration” is necessarily a moral good and that segregated schools (read the black schools under segregation) were necessarily horrible b/c they were filled with black students. Part of this is because of the way the psychologists testifying at the hearing used the black and white dolls. But part of it is also the hubris of being white. Well, of course, blacks would want to be in our schools. And of course black schools are failing. It ignores the many incredible efforts blacks have made over the years to become educated.
So then the play. I sat near the black professors, so we could chat, but once there was more than one, I was pretty much ignored. I did get to talk with one a bit before the performance and I knew the play had upset him. During the intermission, two moved down the row, so they were no longer near me. I tried not to take it personally. They had purposefully put themselves in the limited view seats, perhaps because they found it that painful.
Watching it rather than reading it, I realized that the play is sort of a litany of things that the white woman learned while living next to and befriending black neighbors. What do I do with the little girl’s hair when she sleeps over? Why do the neighbors get dressed to the nines to go on a car trip? Why do they spend way more time making their homes sparkling? Is there color preferences within black communities for lighter skinned folk? Why do black folks seem to know so much about whites when whites don’t know very much about blacks? (The playwright mentioned several times that the whites in the neighborhood where something like sheep, so innocent were they of race relations). These are things I think many whites go through when first learning about race relations. I know I had a ton of questions about black culture when I started and a lot of mis-understandings. So I think it is a good thing that she explored these things in her play, and did it in an effective way.
The problems arise in a few different places…The black characters in the play come across as “more white than the whites” (taking that from the phrase “more British than the British”). They have little to distinguish them as blacks other than their heightened pursuit of cleanliness and education so as not to fall into stereotypes. Furthermore, they all bewailed the responsibilities expected of them as educated blacks. They felt responsible, in a burdensome way, for all the blacks not becoming successful. On some level, I think this is the way some whites understand the spirit of responsibility in black communities–through the gaze of its a burden. Because if a white person had to feel responsible for every white criminal in the papers, it would seem like a burden. And most whites don’t necessarily have to take on the responsibilities of an entire race.
But here we’re getting close to something that so disturbed me last night. I had wanted to mention during the discussion time that most of the black middle class folks I knew through my studies enjoyed various aspects of black culture. They did identify as having this specific culture, even while also striving for a middle class lifestyle that necessitated putting on a double consciousness to live in a semi-white world (much less white, on some level, during Jim Crow; and then again, more white too). One of the black professors raised the problem during his comments that the playwright categorized the sense of responsibility as unilaterally a burden, when in fact many, many black middle class folks took it up eagerly and faithfully.
And here is something I’m petrified about my dissertation. I recognized that sense of responsibility early on, because I think I was raised with something similar in the Christian church. But lately, I’ve been stressing in my diss the ways in which blacks lived with that “burden.” And some of my folks did find it a burden, though certainly not all. And some found it a burden one day while finding it a meaningful pursuit the next day. I am also emphasizing in my work the individuality and “lives lived” of my folks…i.e. that blacks had a right not to be activists. Sometimes it feels like all of African American history is searching for the activists, searching for proof that blacks did fight the conditions they were given. But sometimes that feels like it sets up too many expectations, and ignores certain things in the search for activism. One of the things I find most interesting is relationships between individual intellectuals (black to white, but also importantly black to black).
But now I am scared shitless that I am just pressing my own expectations down onto the data of my dissertation. I mean, certainly, I am going to choose the data that I chose based on my own understanding of its importance. But what if I am just as simplistic and uninformed as the white playwright? What if I, too, only see the public face of the double consciousness? What if I have mistakenly painted the sense of responsibility as a burden, because that is the way a white person would interpret things? (on the upside, I thought of this myself during the play, rather than only realizing it after the black professor spoke).
This is the problem with such a massively huge dissertation. The thought of editing it freaks the hell out of me. Particularly in these undercurrent thematic type things. Those are things you work on after getting all the ducks lined up in a row–what is the overall sense that the document is giving off, based on the particular emphases you give line by line. I have a hard enough time working on the themes of a 30 page document, let alone a 700. I try to keep telling myself that it doesn’t have to all happen Right Now, but that doesn’t really help. If I get a call from a job, they’ll want to see my dissertation and will judge my abilities based on it (granted, if it’s a mostly white search committee, they might feel more comfortable with the way I express things, but I would absolutely not want to alienate any potential black colleagues off the bat). And, that black professor most vocal last night will be reading it and commenting on it at my defense. I need to come up with a better justification for it than that given by the white playwright last night (my one black friend liked it!)
Part of the reason I’m rambling on at this length here is that I’m thinking about taking on some of these undercurrents of race relations in a conference paper I need to finish this weekend (unless I give up and use the one from earlier in the semester).
fluttering sadness
Really have no idea what I’m doing with myself. Need to be writing job and post-doc applications, but feeling rather anxious right now about the overall scope of my project. And anxious about the outcome of these applications. One thing I’m trying to do is catch up with all the secondary literature I’ve been ignoring while focusing on the primary (letters, newspaper and magazine articles, autobiographies, etc.).
Someone recalled my advisor’s book, which has been sitting unread on my shelves for two years or more. So before I turn it in today, I thought I’d give it a once over. It’s about Southern ministers and slavery. The last paragraph of the introduction:
This story is ultimately painful and occasionally tragic. Most of the ministers I will discuss were, by any standards, basically decent, thoughtful, and deeply committed men. Faced with a deep and pervasive problem in their society, they, as many ministers before and since, failed to find a solution which they felt was morally proper, mutually satisfying, and politically shrewd. Their tragedy was their inability to deal with the peculiar institution consistently in any of these ways. Characterized by compromise and indecision, the story of the relationship between these churches is occasionally ugly and always very sad.
Watched “Endgame” last night, a British tv movie on Masterpiece Contemporary. It is about the “talks about talks” between white and black South Africans that ultimately led to more formal talks and the dismantling of apartheid. The black ANC representative (played by one of my favorite actors, Chiwetel Ejiofor) had to accept diplomacy rather than the ANC’s mantra of the previous twenty years that only violence would bring down apartheid. The white representative (an anti-apartheid professor) was horrified by the violence of both sides of the conflict and had to figure out how to even talk to the ANC representative. The talks were hosted by a middle-management businessman of a gold company. The movie was lovely and the story true (only very recently did the role of the gold company come out). But I’m wondering about the implications of the show…I can’t quite articulate it, but it’s almost like the movie did not at once show how incredibly brave these three men were to put down their prejudices and act and meet and befriend (as compared to most of us, who are much more like the above ministers than not), and at the same time it herocizes and simplifies an incredibly complex political process.
So much of childhood is about validating heroes and looking confusedly at adults who move so slowly and have bequeathed such an effed up world. So much of adulthood is learning how improbable the dreams of youth to change the world actually are. (I’m picking up an E’ism here…that’s a common verbal construction of his, and one that annoys me at times for its over-generalization, yet here it seems apt).
Thoughts?
“When Madness Is in the Wings”
THERE are two kinds of madness: the kind that strikes suddenly, like a startled bird, and the kind that stalks silently for years, circling round and round until you are fully gathered in its dark wings. Mine was the latter.
