One of the things that I talk about in my classes is ethics. Morals and values make up a big portion of my work, as we not only deal with heavy classics like The Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, and Hamlet, but because grappling with what one feels is the best way to grow.
As I mentioned before, my students this year seem to struggle with Machiavelli's works more than usual. This isn't to say that they don't have opinions--oh, do they have opinions. Instead, there's a drift towards grayness and an unmoored sense of rightness. I don't know where it's coming from, but it's becoming more and more apparent as the year goes on. In fact, I'm looking forward to our heaviest philosophical days this November, when we get to really struggle to understand what we value, because the class of 2021 has a fragility there that's worth exposing. That being said, today's conversation had me wondering where, exactly, they're coming from. In Machiavelli's view, the reason why you can exploit people and rationalize "the ends justify the means" philosophy is that "people are bad". They will lie, cheat, steal, and be horrible. I don't disagree that people do those things: We humans are quite good at being immensely inhuman (and inhumane). But I disagree that we are bad, as if our inherent nature is one of badness. Aside from the kids who thought themselves wise because they wanted a middle option, the students stratified in similar movements as they have in the past: One class was heavily on the side of "people are good" and the other was more evenly split, with the slimmer majority erring on the side of "people are bad". I specifically didn't discuss the way the students voted, instead asking them to write their thoughts down in their reading journals and coming to a conclusion on their own--though, if they were thinking very hard about this at all, they probably didn't come to a new understanding or they had no conclusion to land upon. Here's what gets me: While not all of my students are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a hefty chunk of them is. And since I'm a member, too, I know that there are certain standards of behavior and even doctrinal declarations that inform the way in which Mormonism considers human beings--and though there's room (as always) for hermeneutics, that's usually a positive feeling toward people. Yet LDS students will so often be the ones to declare that people are inherently bad, to find excuses to rationalize murder (in hypothetical situations, of course), and refuse to empathize with other peoples and places. Quick example: One student commented in a paper that she couldn't agree with Dante because his idea of hell contained no repentance, and so she couldn't enjoy the poem. Not only is this a fundamental misreading of the poem--which I'm surprised at, as I certainly explained the way Dante thought, contextualizing his point of view (which wasn't hers, obviously, so why was she so bothered that she had to read something that didn't conform to her opinions?)--but it also misunderstands the whole historical (and, perhaps, theological) purpose of hell. Hell isn't for repentance. Why would it be? Not just within Dante's purview, but within the entirety of the Abrahamic traditions, much of which she learned about in ninth grade as she explored ancient world history. Anyway, when I confronted the students about whether they thought that people were born good or bad, if they inherently are one way or the other, one of the students asked what I thought on the matter. I brushed aside the question--as I always do, preferring to instead shame them with the implications of their decision rather than bludgeoning them with my opinion (and, yes, I think there's a difference)--and moved on with my lesson. But the fact that students ask me that so often has left me wondering if perhaps I'm doing a disservice to them. Earlier last week, one of the students came up to me and confidently asserted that he knew how I felt about a particular topic. "Do you really?" I asked. He immediately backtracked, admitting that I could be manipulating him and so maybe he wasn't sure after all. For some reason, I feel like this sort of mystery is beneficial to students. I mean, I do it for a reason: I think that if I were to be more overt in my position on certain topics, it would shade the way in which students viewed the decision ("Well, of course Dowdle thinks that way: He's a liberal.") rather than having the flexibility of asking questions or defending positions that I don't truly hold. Still, the question haunts me: What do I think? I really don't know. I like to think that I have a narrow alley of eclectic tastes. I like world history--mostly British, to be honest--and Shakespearean drama. I like Milton's poetry. I like comic books, with Spider-Man being my bae. I understand the World Wars better than most (well, that may be debatable). I play the guitar--mostly nineties alternative stuff. I used to play quidditch. I really enjoy deconstructivism, postmodernism, and new technology, though I'm unimpressed by modern architecture or the potential nihilism inside of current social trends. I like philosophy and I also like dinosaurs.
It's that last little bit that made me think. Today, I'm not at school. Instead, I'm spending the morning/early afternoon at Barnes and Noble, editing my manuscript and enjoying the ambiance. Before I sat down at my computer, I flitted through the store, checking out the different titles that caught my eye. As I do whenever I have the time, I worked my way to the back part of the store, where they keep their selections on philosophy. A couple of things I noticed: One is that they've recently (in that I just noticed it) created a subset of philosophy that's called "Agnosticism and Atheism", putting Dawkins and Hitchens and men of their ilk all in the same spot. While a great many other philosophers were also atheists, the idea is to put books that fully deny the reality of God all in one place. It takes up about two and a half shelves. The LDS (not even counting the religion and Christian sections) are entire rows. So it's not what I would call a particularly popular section. Anyway, so it seems like there's a binary at work here. The movie franchise God is Not Dead has just released its third film. Then there are titles like God is Not Good and The God Delusion. It made me wonder: Is there a center to this Venn diagram? Is there a book out there that's called, God is Okay or something like that? Maybe Schrodinger's God: Neither Dead nor Alive Until You Pray To Her/Him? If so, it perhaps shows that though people often want to have a middle path in choices, sometimes centrism is kind of stupid. Thought number two: There are lots of ways that philosophers have tried to get people to know more about the great thoughts of the (usually) Western tradition. I am a fan of the Philosophy and Pop Culture series, which has done a lot for helping me to understand some basic principles about philosophy. Stuff about Batman, the Terminator, zombies, and more are considered with a philosophical bent. So where's my Dinosaurs and Philosophy? To be fair, that's a tricky prospect. Not only is there no canon to discuss, but where do you start with that? The easiest way is to consider a franchise that also explores dinosaurs. They have one: In fact, Puck, my eleven year old, tried to read some of Jurassic Park and Philosophy a year or two ago. But Jurassic Park is a different creature (pun intended) than real dinosaurs. Though I don't have a lot of training in this, I think it would be a fun reason to dive back into philosophy. Looking for a system of ethics for Dromaeosaurus, for example, could be pretty fun. The thing is, I don't know what that would look like. I mean, philosophy is part of what makes humans unique (so far as we know). And when you're arguing about the morality of a Allosaurus and whether or not it ought to eat the baby Stegosaurus, well…that just sounds silly. Obviously, I need this book because I'm not smart enough to write this book. If any of you out there would like to make this happen, I would be happy to give you some of my money so that I can read it. Thanks in advance. ==== Hey, friends. I have been releasing essays on my website for a couple of years now at a pretty steady rate. I'm happy to do so, as it benefits me as a writer and (I hope) you as a reader. I also think that, as a writer, it's okay if I believe that my work has some value monetarily as well as emotionally. To that end, I've created a Ko-Fi account, which is basically a way to give an online tip to a creator whose work you appreciate. The idea is, you can buy them a cup of coffee. (That's what the of the website sounds like, if you're curious.) I'm not charging for any of the content on my website; instead, if you'd like to toss me a cup-le (see what I did there?) of bucks to show your gratitude, that would be cool. I'd totally appreciate that appreciation. If you don't? No problem. We can still be friends. As always, thanks for reading! One of my friends and coworkers started a blog today with this as his first entry. It's an interesting insight, one delivered with his characteristic optimism and enthusiasm. In fact, if you read his essay, you'll get a pretty good sense of who he is and the way he sees the world. This essay is in no way meant to denigrate what Michael wrote, nor try to contradict his point. In fact, I think it makes a lot of sense, and the resilience of youth is one of their greatest assets. But I think living is more nuanced than Michael's post gives it credit. In fact, reading his post made me think of John Milton. Okay, that's not such a new thing. I have been a Milton fanboy for over a decade now, so it's not unusual for me to think of Milton. If I had to put it into a ratio, I'd say that I think about Shakespeare about ten times as often as I do Milton, but that's because Shakespeare has more to say about a broader range of topics. But what Milton has to say no one--and this includes the Bard--can top him. (The great power of Shakespeare is, though he may appear to be a jack-of-all-trades* but a master of none, he's actually a master of all trades; everything he has to say he says with such power and brilliance that I'm often left stunned, despite having studying him for over fifteen years.) One of the things that really draws me to Milton is his transparency with his own times. Shakespearean biography is small; what we have of the man is precious little, at least so far as hard facts and verified documents. There are suggestions about what he was doing or thinking at a particular time, but the fact is, we simply don't know for certain what was going on with him through much of his life. Not so with Milton. Though we don't have a full-fledged diary for his entire life, there's enough connections between what's known of his life and what's in his poetry that we can draw sharper conclusions. By having a writer whose work is more clearly personal and autobiographical means that interpretive exercises can take a more specific tact. I mention all of this for two reasons. One, I'm reading a book that has a chapter about Milton, so he's fresh on my mind. Two--and more importantly--he has a poem, Sonnet 19, "When I Consider How My Life Is Spent", that touches on the nuance I wanted to address with regard to Michael's post. This is the poem: When I consider how my light is spent, More than any part of the whole piece, it's that last line that stands out to me. "They also serve who only stand and wait." I feel as though Michael's statements reflect a great outlook, and one of proactive work. I think Milton is reminding us that busyness for busyness' sake is not worthwhile. Sometimes the harder path isn't about working, but resting. "Be still." Particularly when there's something that remains just out of reach--something longed for but elusive--and it is patience that is required, it can be difficult to give into that need to "stand and wait."
Lest you take my meaning awry, you should know that Milton's downtime was not idleness. He was preparing--reading (voraciously), learning new languages (he knew ten or so by the time he died, with his Latin of such high degree he was considered the best Latin speaker ever to come out of England), and pondering deeply the religious and political ideals that meant so much to him. You can make the argument that this was a type of work, a type of effort, and I don't disagree. But there's a difference between daydreaming and writing, of plotting a story and writing it. The downtime--the apparently idle--can sometimes be just as crucial as the work. Without preparation, there can't be the success we want. So, yes, the tenacity of being a baby is necessary--of falling down and getting back up. But so, too, is the need of pausing, reflecting, and (as the case may be) sleeping in order to be better able to stand on your own two feet. ==== Hey, friends. I have been releasing essays on my website for a couple of years now at a pretty steady rate. I'm happy to do so, as it benefits me as a writer and (I hope) you as a reader. I also think that, as a writer, it's okay if I believe that my work has some value monetarily as well as emotionally. To that end, I've created a Ko-Fi account, which is basically a way to give an online tip to a creator whose work you appreciate. The idea is, you can buy them a cup of coffee. (That's what the of the website sounds like, if you're curious.) I'm not charging for any of the content on my website; instead, if you'd like to toss me a cup-le (see what I did there?) of bucks to show your gratitude, that would be cool. I'd totally appreciate that appreciation. If you don't? No problem. We can still be friends. As always, thanks for reading! --- * I use this phrase because it's fitting, but also because of Robert Greene, a playwright and critic of the early Elizabethan stage, best remembered for his Groat's Worth of Wit in which he calls Shakespeare iohannes fac totum--jack of all trades. Brilliant allusion on my part that requires a paragraph of a footnote to explain…so maybe not so brilliant after all, hey? Note: I have finished my paper for the Wooden O. I've shown pieces of this on the website before, but this is my final draft. The formatting is weird, I know. Also, there are asterisks everywhere. Those are to let me know when to advance the slides during the presentation. Feel free to ignore them.
*Jacques Derrida: "There's no racism without language…The point is not that acts of racial violence are only words, but rather that they have to have a word. [Racism] institutes, declares, writes, inscribes, prescribes."[i] *Othello: "I know thou'rt full of love and honesty,/And weigh'st thy words before thou giv'st them breath." *Iago: "I hate the Moor." In his eponymous play, Othello is called by his own name twenty-seven times. He is referred to as "the Moor" forty-three times. This statistic underscores the use of nomenclature as violence against aliens, the way the most fundamental system in which people operate and learn and grow--namely, language--can be sharpened as a tool of oppression against the Other. From Derrida's perspective, that is the only way that racism germinates. (For context, I am using Vron Ware's definition of racism: "[that which] encompasses all the various relations of power that have arisen from the domination of one racial group over another."[ii]) We can perhaps interrogate Shakespeare's motive, but, like Iago's, it is as allusive as it is elusive. Certainly, meter plays a part of Shakespeare's decisions. *"The Moor" has two syllables, while Othello does not. And though *"uh-THELL-oh"[iii] contains a full iamb, on its own it's an amphibrach. The Bard could not end a line with Othello's name without pushing it into a feminine ending (with the stress on the penultimate syllable). This is not to say that Shakespeare doesn't rely on feminine endings. Desdemona completes her husband's line: *"I'll not believe't./How now, my dear Othello?" (3.3.282) Always keeping in mind that perhaps Shakespeare was less worried about his lines than we are, we can see all three of Desdemona's lines in this section are feminine. The extra syllable is necessary, of course, to express all of the words that she's using, but there could also be an additional tension, an indication that though she's innocent of the crime Othello assumes of her, she senses something wrong in him. The lines throughout this middle section of the scene scan differently. Lines with too many syllables, others with too few--Desdemona's words and actions, all orbiting around the napkin that proves to be the false evidence her husband needs to commit murder, interact with the tension of something being wrong. The relationship, much like the scansion, is falling apart. There are other times where the language of oppression is subtly attuned via the euphemism. For example, when Iago expresses his enmity toward the hero (1.3.375), the line also scans differently than the norm: *But for my sport and profit. I hate the Moor. Not only is it eleven syllables, but the inclusion of the *pyrrhic foot between the ultimate syllable of "profit" and the monosyllabic "I" is what causes the line's extension. "Othello" could not be simply swapped into this line's current structure. It would become hexameter instead of feminine pentameter and gain an unstressed ending. The deterritorialization of humanity and Othello's ontological beinghood that is perpetrated by means of the euphemism thus stands within the poetic system as being integral, yet at the same time uncouth, out of place, and indicative of a deep problem. We can read this, then, as a poetic excoriation of racism. Shakespeare tends not to take sides and it would be too much to say that a bonus syllable on a line early on in the play is his way of subverting the oppressive system which allows the continuation of racism. Rather, it may be better to consider this as symbolic, a recognition of the ways in which something that is wrong can nevertheless be explained away, incorporated into the system, and--as is especially the case of Iago--thought of as "the way things are". There's nothing too extreme about having an eleven-syllable long line--Othello is replete with them. So, too, do racists in Western culture often justify the small expressions of white supremacy with which they vocally oppress minorities. Snide comments, failure to listen to those whose lived experiences are filled with examples of the very real ramifications of racism, or jokes that only operate by assuming the worst of a stereotype are all "eleventh syllable" versions of racism--tiny things, operating on the fringe, yet allowed within the system. Othello--both the man and the play--exists in a world where the whirl of words underscores and expresses the depth of the anxieties within the Venetian society. Iago as Othello's foil is foul, his mind at its starting point in the gutter and only descending lower. Iago's *vileness is sketched at *first with hasty lines about what Othello and Desdemona are doing--a married couple's consummation seems to fill him with revulsion and disgust. And though *his (in)famous line about the "old black ram/Is tupping your white ewe" (1.1.88-89) equates the act among the same species, his implication is only a matter of degree away from Horace's "snakes do not mate with birds, or lambs with tigers" (qtd. Neil 41). That these are racist "undertones" is clear: To imply that there are gradations of humanity, that the Human Race can be subdivided into separate species, some of whom are inferior to another, is visible inside of how almost everyone sees, treats, and speaks to Othello. The frequent allusions to him being of demonic breeding, hell-sent, or animalistic serve to enhance this reading. Othello even has to struggle against the internalized racism, which slips out in some of his moments of distress. *Consider: "Her name, that was as fresh /As Dian's visage, is now begrimed and black /As mine own face" (3.3.388-390). Equating the color of his skin to an inherent filthiness is perhaps not surprising when one recalls that Othello is a former slave (1.3.138), or that his father-in-law is so openly hostile that he accuses Othello of having charmed his (Brabantio's) daughter, a piece of witchcraft that could be the only explanation for the miscegenation: I therefore vouch again That with some mixtures powerful o'er the blood, Or with some dram conjured to this effect, He wrought upon her. (1.3.104-107) Certainly there's something about Othello's society that has seeped into him. We see his words degrade the longer he spends time with Iago. By the end, it seems as if he's swearing almost as often as his ensign. Perhaps the endless assaults on his basic humanity, the innuendos and the prejudicial barriers, the need to justify a behavior as fundamentally human as falling in love with a woman and, seeing that love reciprocated, marrying her--perhaps it's not surprising to see Othello is crippled with doubt. Othello's eventual downfall is done because choosing a beautiful woman as a wife without it being called into question is a denied privilege for a Black man. We hear this pitiful pathos when he says, as much to convince himself as Iago, "For she had eyes and chose me" (3.3.192). Iago uses the verbal tools of his own demoniacal brilliance and the linguistically saturated assumptions of the racist society in which he lives to leverage that gift in order to extract all would-be meaning from the life and marriage of Othello. Though Shakespeare doesn't always imbue deep significance in the final words of many of his creations, he does do so on occasion. In the case of the end of Othello, there is great meaning in Iago's final lines: "Demand me nothing: what you know, you know; / From this time forth I never will speak word." Sadly, the silence of Iago cannot undo the damage that his words have done. "There's no racism without language," meaning that, sometimes, silence comes too late. *The Merchant of Venice *"In early modern anti-Semitism…the Jews were denounced for their limitation, for sticking to their particular way of life...With late nineteenth-century chauvinist imperialism, the logic was inverted: the Jews were perceived as cosmopolitan, as the embodiment of an unlimited, 'deracinated' existence, which, like a cancerous intruder, threatens to dissolve the identity of every particular-limited ethnic community." --Slavoj Žižek[iv] *"Jews have never been grafted onto the stock of other people." --Andrew Willet, 1590[v] *"Just as it is often hard to tell a toadstool from an edible mushroom, so too it is often very hard to recognize the Jew as a swindler and criminal..." --Der Giftpilz (The Poisoned Mushroom)[vi] *"Certainly the Jew is the very devil incarnation." --Lancelot Gobbo Modern audiences of any of Shakespeare's works see a different story than what the Elizabethan/Jacobean audiences experienced at the Globe Theatre. Nowhere is this more visible than with The Merchant of Venice. Reading this play in our post-Holocaust world means that we access the story through Shylock--an avenue that likely would have baffled the original audiences. In some ways, our extratextual sympathies for Shylock come as a type of cultural allergy to anything connected to Nazism. In my view, such an allergy is important, and in the case of The Merchant of Venice, it serves to urge a cautiousness on the readers. After all, Germany had, for many years before the rise of the Third Reich, called the Bard "unser Shakespear", or "our Shakespeare".[vii] Hitler is said to have declared that "Shylock was a 'timelessly valid characterization of the Jew'."[viii] In some ways, audiences want to sympathize with Shylock simply as a way of, as it were, striking back against the horrors that Nazism unleashed on the Jewish people. Shakespeare makes it easy for us to sympathize with his villain. There is, after all, his *stirring speech about the shared humanity of all: *"Hath not a Jew eyes…?" (Harold Bloom argues that he is "not moved by [Shylock's]…litany, since what he is saying there is now of possible interest only to wavering skinheads and similar sociopaths"[ix], perhaps mistaking the specific for the general.) And, read in this excerpted sense, it's easy to see how sympathetic Shylock's plea is. *Read in further context, however, we see that Shylock's words also spell out his justification for a legalized murder. The difficulty of critiquing this sort of behavior is that Shylock is himself a victim of oppressive systems--if not through Shakespeare's version of Venice, but through the centuries of anti-Semitism. Shylock, then, is a different villain than Iago. What would Othello look like if the Black character were Iago? The villain? That is what we get with Shylock, and yet he manages to gain the sympathies of the audience more fully than perhaps any other antagonist in Shakespeare's canon. But what of the language itself? When the words are on stage, what do they say? Almost all of the Christians in the play have a racial bias, if not against Jews (as Antonio, Bassanio, the Salads (Salarino and Solanio), Lancelot, and Gratiano all show), then against any who look different to the Christian society (consider Portia's snort, "Let all of his complexion choose me so" (2.7.79)). *To pursue but one example of many: Consider this conversation between the Salads and Shylock (3.1): SALANIO Let me say 'amen' betimes, lest the devil cross my prayer, for here he comes in the likeness of a Jew. Enter SHYLOCK SALANIO …And Shylock, for his own part, knew the bird was fledged; and then it is the complexion of them all to leave the dam. SHYLOCK She is damned for it. SALANIO That's certain, if the devil may be her judge. SHYLOCK My own flesh and blood to rebel! SALANIO Out upon it, old carrion! rebels it at these years? SHYLOCK I say, my daughter is my flesh and blood. SALARINO There is more difference between thy flesh and hers than between jet and ivory; more between your bloods than there is between red wine and Rhenish. The racial lines are clearly staked in color, flesh (with attendant connotations of sexuality), and animalistic metaphors, but there's an unambiguous intonation, too, one that we've seen time and again throughout the play: The equation of Jewishness to the devil. *As demonstrated by the colors on the slide, you can see the interplay of assumptions, contradictions, puns, and insults mounting on top of Shylock and, in many ways, the Jewish nation in general. Shylock's explanation for such hatred and scorn is never denied by the Christians: They do hate him, it seems, because he is a Jew. The manifestations of the racial animus are heard throughout the play, then most clearly seen in the climactic trial scene (4.1). When Portia first arrives, she asks a question (that can be read in many ways): "Which is the merchant here, and which the Jew?" (169), a question that can be comedic if the merchant is in chains and the Jew is wearing his gaberdine and yarmulke, but points to the possibility of Portia's disinterest in the case. Yet Shylock's assertion when he completes the brief *chiasmus ("Is your name Shylock? / *Shylock is my name" (171)) points toward what David Suchet observed: "He's only called by his name, Shylock, six times; Jew, twenty-two." In a world where the removal of a Jew's name carries with it dark undertones, it's difficult not to see the significance these words carry. *Perhaps it is *poetically rational, as it was with Othello: *the Jew as opposed to Shylock (the one being an iamb, the other a trochee). *Portia's split line (177) "Then must the Jew be merciful" can't fit the meter with "Shylock" in place of his euphemism. Still, Shakespeare is not always consistent with his verse. No, this subtle form of racism--of "deracinating" or, more largely, "dehumanizing"--is encoded in the words which are spoken and support the system which is designed to oppress and deny those deemed subhuman. Maybe we should say that Shylock's eventual--perhaps even inevitable--defeat is the largest indictment of a racially unjust society. His goal of murder is hardly laudable, and there is much to be said about the way in which the Venetian government got out of the curse he laid on them ("…fie upon your law" (100)), but the point still remains that, in a racist, anti-Semitic society such as the one we see on the stage, Shylock never had a chance. He tried to show the Christians their "villainy", only to be subsumed into Christianity. His rebellion turned into submission with the heart-breaking lie, "I am content" (389), and we see, yet again, how those exploited by the system which oppresses them is designed to keep them in their so-called "proper place". *1 Henry VI *"The female loves to play man against man, and if she is in a position to do it there is not one who will not resist. The male, for all his bravado and exploration, is the loyal one, the one who generally feels love. The female is skilled at betrayal and torture and damnation. Never envy a man his lady. Behind it all lays a living hell." --Charles Bukowski [x] *"Foul fiend of France, and hag of all despite…" --Talbot *"These women are shrewd tempters with their tongues." --Alençon Intersectional feminism--a term first coined in 1989 by Kimberlé Crenshaw--shows us how the previous examples of racist coding that support their oppressive systems is also at work in patriarchal constructs. Though there are many Shakespearean examples of female disempowerment at the hands--and language--of men, we will focus on Joan la Pucelle. Before we go too far, a word on women in Shakespeare. From the beginning, Shakespeare was interested in the feminine. Adriana points out the double standard of masculine versus feminine behavior in The Comedy of Errors, and it is drawn in more nuanced terms late in his career in the conversation between Emilia and Desdemona in Othello. This rendering of women in sympathetic light is made more remarkable when we remember the Tudor's restrictions on female representation prevented Shakespeare from exploring the feminine more frequently than he otherwise could have. Without being able to allow women on stage, it is, in some ways, exceptional we have as much from him as we do. *Statistically, women are severely underrepresented in his plays (though I would disagree with Ray Bradbury when he says "all the best lines went to the men"). This is explicable in that much of the subject matter Shakespeare discusses has to do with monarchies--historically masculine, particularly in these history plays. However, Shakespeare had no compulsion to render women in anything other than stock characters or stereotypes. So it is surprising to see how often women are given a great deal of lines within the broader context of the society and limitations in which the plays were written. In fact, there are a handful of plays in which the lead female character has a greater percentage of the lines than any other single speaker. These include Cymbeline (Imogen 16%), All's Well that Ends Well (Helena 16%), As You Like It (Rosalind 25%), The Comedy of Errors (Adriana ties with Antipholus of Syracuse at 15%), The Merchant of Venice (Portia 22%), The Merry Wives of Windsor (the two Mistresses make up 22%, though Falstaff has the largest single chunk at 17%), and Twelfth Night (technically a three-way tie among Belch, Viola, and Olivia at 13%). [xi] That being said, let us consider Joan of Arc. Though the other two plays discussed likewise have sources, Joan la Pucelle is a real-life historical character--as are the others throughout the play--and Joan's treatment by Shakespeare is worth observing. As she's allied with the French cause and Shakespeare seems more sympathetic to the British, her character falls within the Madonna/whore trope: She's a *"holy maid…Ordainèd is to raise this tedious siege" (1.3.30, 33) when first introduced by the Bastard of Orléans and *tried as "Wicked and vile" (5.6.16) by the English. The trope is pushed even further at the end of the play when she throws out names of would-be lovers in the hopes of gaining clemency. This binary is familiar to *feminist critical theory as it's one of the most frequent tropes women are cast in throughout Western literature. Joan's complexity as a character--marred as it is by Shakespeare's burgeoning talent during this early play--does suffer from the lack of nuance that other Shakespearean women enjoy. The Madonna/whore trope seems ridiculous when applied to someone as conniving, manipulative, and textured as, say, Lady Macbeth. Nevertheless, Joan la Pucelle works well throughout the play as a relative trope: She is both halves of the trope to each side. For Tina Packer, this is indicative of Shakespeare recognizing that he'd created someone charming, but Joan had to be "evil" for his version of the story to work. Packer says, *"Shakespeare's first impulse toward Joan was a generous one…He liked that she dressed as a man, had visions from God and God's mother, wielded a sword…This is Shakespeare at his most natural. It's only when he followed Holinshed's story that he turned…" (20).[xii] (Marjorie Garber points out that even Joan's name is pointing toward this ambiguity: *"Joan, known as La Pucelle…represented the paradox of purity/promiscuity, since 'puzel' and 'pussel' meant 'slatternly woman' or 'slut'" (95).[xiii]) This play is also encoded the way the cross-dressing comedies were: We have a male actor playing a woman's part, who is, in turn, behaving like a man. While Joan never pretends to be a male in the way Portia does, she acts masculine, thereby playing a part that others, sometimes against their own instincts, choose to believe. Consider, for example, the English shock at a woman behaving in a man's role (2.1.22-23): *LORD TALBOT A maid, they say. DUKE OF BEDFORD A maid? And be so martial? DUKE OF BURGUNDY Pray God she prove not masculine ere long. *The first line is split, with Talbot's reference to Joan setting up Bedford's dismay. Interestingly, the line itself is feminine, in part because of the word *martial being the final foot. Read in this light, the feminine ending of the line works ironically against a word normally associated with masculinity. The feminine has usurped and taken over the masculine. Burgundy's *follow up line, therefore, becomes a patriarchal reassertion, invoking both God (patriarchy par excellence) and masculinity. This line is regular verse, alternating its stresses in an iambic pattern. Even the trisyllabic masculine fits into the meter, drawing attention to itself as the only polysyllabic word in the line. The expectation--societal, religious, poetical--of masculine dominance is thus subtly restored. The men about her are quick to doubt, anxious to find fault. In similar ways that women in the twenty-first century are often given half as much a chance to do twice as much, Joan la Pucelle is first called an "Amazon" (1.2.106), but, when the English surprise the French, the men almost immediately lay blame on her for her "failings". *DAUPHIN Is this thy cunning, thou deceitful dame? Didst thou at first, to flatter us withal, Make us partakers of a little gain, That now our loss might be ten times so much? JOAN DE PUCELLE Wherefore is Charles impatient with his friend? At all times will you have my power alike? Sleeping or waking, must I still prevail, Or will you blame and lay the fault on me? Improvident soldiers, had your watch been good, This sudden mischief never could have fall'n. (2.1.53-62) Joan adroitly points out the truth of the situation, and to his credit, the Dauphin recognizes that she's right. After some more scapegoating, it is Joan who pulls the squabbling French nobles into the more important enterprise of escape. Joan's speech, however, shines a light on masculine expectations. Her cry, "At all times will you have my power alike?" can remind us of how much is demanded of women in our Western society even in our day. Part of the Shakespearean difference is his acknowledgement that women are, perhaps shockingly to his audience, people, too. When Joan protests her treatment and the unrealistic expectations placed on her, she is part of an ages-old refrain critiquing the double standards of so-called standard. Nevertheless, she is, from Britain's view, "the bad guy (or girl)", necessitating the eventual terror of Act 5 scene 3. This, perhaps, goes along with Packer's assertion about Shakespeare's interest in Joan. It certainly helps to explain the inconsistencies the character can have, vacillating from humble servant to militant Amazon to ungrateful child to pleading prisoner. Perhaps the Bard didn't quite know what to do with a character who wanted so much to be her own person--a lesson that he learns throughout his career--so we don't see any attempt at making her sympathetic to the Elizabethan crowd when 5.3 opens. Joan explains that the "Frenchmen fly" (5.3.1) and then invokes the minions of the "Monarch of the North" (5.3.6)--a euphemism for Satan, who was believed to inhabit the north (see, for example, the placement of Satan's pre-Fallen headquarters in the northern part of Heaven in John Milton's Paradise Lost)--and she then attempts to do anything she can to save herself and reputation. This desperation goes far in this scene, all the way to whoring herself to the fiends, who refuse. She will then compound her sins by lying in order to avoid the pyre. Joan is led off with her *final hex echoing: A plaguing mischief light on Charles and thee! And may ye both be suddenly surpris'd By bloody hands, in sleeping on your beds! …I prithee give me leave to curse a while. (5.3.39-44) Metrically this is all solid, strong, and effective. What's most significant here is the idea of the curse. More fully explored in Richard III (see 1.3 and their "fulfillment" in 3.3), the women that people the history plays often rely on "curses" as an equalizing form. It's linguistic--they're mere words, after all--but they also strike the hearers with a usurpation of the linguistic status quo of masculinity and patriarchy. In a world where martial, political, and religious powers are all monopolized by one gender, and being without any other power given to her, the unuttered curses of Joan stand as her last attempt at retribution. Thus we can return to Derrida's assertion that racism--and, I would argue, sexism or even all modes of Otherness--are embedded inside of language. Shakespeare demonstrates that these methods of dehumanizing our fellow human beings do rely on being able to "institute, declare, write, inscribe, prescribe" the oppressor's will upon the oppressed. We see time and again the poetry of Shakespeare's words implicitly condemning the status quo, even if we can be certain that Shakespeare's words have directly been used to further causes of racism and misogyny. That, perhaps, is the greatest indication of Shakespearean prowess and power: He always gets the last *word. ---- [i] As quoted in "Othello's African American Progeny" by James R. Andreas. Materialist Shakespeare: A History. Verso Books. 1995. [ii] Ware, Vron. Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History. Verso Books. 2015. [iii] See http://www.shakespeare-online.com/plays/characters/charactersO.html for a pronunciation guide. [iv] Žižek, Slavoj. The Parallax View. The MIT Press. 2006. [v] As quoted in James Shapiro's book, Shakespeare and the Jews. Columbia University Press. 1996. [vi] As quoted at https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/der-giftpilz where the Nazi children's book The Poisoned Mushroom is discussed. [vii] As quoted in "Shylock and Nazi Propaganda" from The New York Times. 4 April 1993. [viii] Dickson, Andrew. Worlds Elsewhere. Henry Holt and Co. 2015. [ix] Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. Riverhead. 1998. [x] Taken from http://flavorwire.com/417099/7-breathtakingly-sexist-quotes-by-famous-and-respected-male-authors/8. [xi] Statistics taken from the Shakespeare300 app, which uses Dave and Bill Crystal's calculations, also available in the Shakespeare Miscellany. [xii] Packer, Tina. Women of Will. Knopf. 2015. [xiii] Garber, Marjorie. Shakespeare after All. Anchor Books. 2005. This picture is interesting to me.
My wife and I were on a rare date a few months ago, killing time in Macy's as we waited for a movie to start. She had to go to the bathroom, which has a difficulty level akin to surviving a Dan Brown novel, so we somehow ended up on the topmost floor, the place even janitors fear to tread. Tucked into this ghost-town section of the store was the needed restroom, along with spartan décor for bedrooms and living rooms. It felt like the abandoned ideas of an Ikea layout had all been carelessly aggregated there by an employee on her last day at the job. There wasn't a lot to look at in the first place, and what was there had price tags that would impoverish my family if I did more than glance at them. While I waited for Gayle to take care of the necessary, I spotted the aforementioned picture. It took me a moment to really process what I was looking at. After all, if you're trying to give potential customers a sense of how furniture might work in a room, you'd think that you might want to avoid sepia-toned grayscale for the wallpaper, regardless of the image printed on it. Why make the background to the poorly laid-out display appear to be a circa-1946 photograph of some posh tosser's forgotten study? I can't account for those particular decisions. I did, however, consider what it's trying to say--or, rather, what I'm hearing. I feel like the poster is a visual version of the phrase "pseudointellectual"*. As my friend likes to say, "Knowing enough to be dangerous, but not enough to know what they're talking about." A more generous way of considering this would be to call it "the Reader's Digest version". Wait. No. A Reader's Digest version would at least have words in it. The problem I'm seeing is that images like this--printed out, pasted onto a narrow section of the wall, and then "tastefully" arranging a would-be living room around it--gives a handful of impressions that have a bizarre cachet. That is, giving the impression that there's a valuing of the knowledge of these books (the cachet), but, on closer inspection, seeing there's nothing there at all (the bizarre). This attempt at faux-culture is everywhere in department stores--it's their primary way of hawking their schlock. The seams seem sharper here, though, in part because of my affinity for the thing they're pretending. I really like books. I'm the kind of guy that will stare at a stranger's open book for far too long if I think I might be able to snatch a glimpse of the title. Seeing people reading makes me happy. Being around books makes me happy (which is why I like being in my office, the bookstore, and the library--in that order). But the picture isn't about books: In a far more distressing format of creating the parallax gap between signifier and signified than even "The Treachery of Images" can get at, I see not only non-books (because it's a picture), but non-book books in the non-book poster. Every single one is titleless, as much of a mirage of the potential information that's inside of it as it is a mirage of depth that the high-definition print job creates. It's a poser poster, having taken a photo of something that isn't and pretending that it actually is. In other words, the full package of a department store's slavish (and maybe even, in this late-capitalist phase, desperate) attempts toward generating artificial value via open consumption, all of which masquerades as meaning, stands in isolated and bleak contrast to the blank walls that surround it. In terms of "pseudointellectualism"**, this is the hollowness of having learned something and remembered nothing of it. It's the reason that grades are so fundamentally insufficient for communicating the intellectual capabilities or personal worth of an individual. It's indicative of arrogant opinions, generating an outward veneer of capacity while, in reality, masking the artificiality from and through which the supposed understanding derives. It's a poser. And I think I dislike it so much because it feels like I'm looking into an intellectual mirror. Provided you've stuck around this long through my polysyllabic rant, you might be tempted--and rightly so--to point out that I've just gassed in a pseudointellectual*** mode about the very thing that stands in for pseudointellectualism. Yup. That's my point. When it comes to imposter (imposer) syndrome, I'm the poser (poster) child--albeit self-proclaimed, which adds another level of irony in there somewhere. Nothing points out my own inadequacies as does teaching. After a bit of mathing (not a word, nor a topic I'm very good at), I estimate that I've spent 16,000 hours teaching in a school setting. You would think that, after all of that time, I would consider myself an expert at it. On one level, I know that I am. But on another, more pressing, painful, and some-other-word-that-starts-with-P level, I've only come to a better knowledge of how little I know. I've lamented this before, but I really do feel inadequate to do my job.**** I don't know very much, and what I do know is either mostly-useless trivia (see: Anything I've written about Shakespeare) or isn't what we mean by saying we know something. This was brought to light (again) for me today while I tried to put together the proposed path for next year's Shakespeare class. I'm teaching Shax and his predecessors, which is supposed to look at tragedy through history, comparing it to Shakespeare's genius in order to get a better sense of why we say the Bard is the best. To get to that point of the analysis (and, yes, I know I'm begging the question on that topic; I'll try to frame it better when I get into the class), we have to pass through things that I haven't read or fully understood. I don't feel that I have the intellectual capacity/skill/background to do what I've been asked to do. And while I can take refuge in the fact that I need to have enough of a grip to teach high schoolers, there's the realization that, though they're kids, they're intelligent, capable humans, too. They have a lot to offer, and I don't think it's unfair of me to expect myself to be at least at that same level. Then again, maybe I'm just blowing smoke. Maybe it's just a pos(t)er and I should calm down. Pseudointellectual.***** --- * Full disclosure: I misspelled this word when I first typed it. That embarrassing irony will likely haunt me. ** Misspelled it again. *** Got it this time! Third time's a charm. **** The fact that my boss sees my posts and can read this particular essay should worry me. Strangely enough, it doesn't. Says a lot about how I feel toward my administration--and what I think they feel for me. ***** Nailed it. Here's a thought:
Online personality tests have supplanted magazine personality tests which long ago supplanted phrenology and prognostications, then almanacs and astrology and augury and whatever other types of divination filled up the gaps of history. Despite excellent strides forward to understand the ways in which humans think, feel, and behave, there will likely always be some incomprehensible space--a parallax gap--between chaos and prediction, should-be laws and inevitable exceptions. It's in that space that these aforementioned impulses multiply. I don't see anything as inherently wrong with them, provided they're understood as a tool of varying usefulness for certain people. One of the things that I hear talked about a lot would be different types of personality--the idea of a "red personality" is so ubiquitous that, regardless of its accuracy, has crept into our lexicon. Another one that we use frequently (and has some validity in my life, I've found) is the "love languages" conceit. The short version is that each person has different ways of giving and receiving love, whether it be from physical contact, gifts, compliments, or what have you. I, for example, like gifts and support for my choices, whether they be hobbies like writing, or careers like teaching. This led me to think about what the love language of God would be. As a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I come with certain expectations about God. He's very New Testament in my purview, a God of love and compassion, of fatherly impulses and, dare I say, yearnings toward His children, who comprise the entirety of humanity, past, present, and future. In that superficial reading of my religion, the answer to the question of God's love language would be everything. But I find that unsatisfying, especially as the idea that literally everything humans do can't possibly please God equally. Hatred and violence--fighting amongst His children--don't seem to jive with what He's pronounced scripturally. "Okay," says my strawman, "then everything good." But I find that fraught, too, as what was good once is no longer. I don't mean this in the sort of "black is white, up is down" kind of thing, I mean in a straightforward progress from the past to the present. Even without getting into digressions about "the world", there are plenty of things that God once called good--and even necessary--isn't anymore. The one that springs to mind quickest would have to be animal sacrifices. According to my (and a lot of Christian) tradition, Christ's sacrifice in the meridian of time absolved followers from partaking in these once-good behaviors. The sweet smells of sacrifice no longer please God. His love language changed. So what does He want? There are some standard scriptural answers: "A broken heart and a contrite spirit." Excellent…but what does that mean for being a love language? What's actionable in that conceit? A lot of the answers I can think of revolve around the idea of internal improvement: Being better today than I was tomorrow; finding ways to show love toward other people ("If ye love me, keep my commandments" and "As I have loved you, love one another"); increasing the good that's in the world. These internal desires could be moving outward and thereby showing what we do "to the least of these my brethren" would be the way in which God receives love from us. That works for me, but I don't know if it's enough. My wife will accept any offering of love from me, whether it be in her preferred mode or not. God, unsurprisingly, is capable of recognizing and accepting our love however we display it, but that isn't really what I'm trying to look at. What does God prefer? Gifts of a certain type? Obedience? Taking on covenants with Him and abiding in them? Wearing white shirts on Sundays? Being generous with fast offerings? Again, I can see Him accepting all of these, but what's His preference? Where does His taste lead him? Perhaps I'm splitting hairs. Maybe the "love one another" is the way that God accepts our love (which He gave us first) and all the other things are simply all the other things: Outward manifestations of an inner commitment. As a sectarian humanist, this makes the most sense to me. Focusing on how we relate to and with other people is a part of the Mormon theology that continually draws me in. Serving others--in whatever capacity we can--seems to connect with the ideas of showing God our love. But that can be expanded outward, couldn't it? Maybe not exploiting the planet to the detriment of other species is also how we show love? (I'm not of the dominion theory of purpose of humanity on Earth; I see our responsibility is toward conservation and preservation rather than exploitation or subjugation.) Maybe not preserving systems and hierarchies that oppress and diminish? Maybe not abiding by philosophies in which others have to prove their humanity before they can be considered worthwhile or valuable enough to help and listen to? It needn't necessarily be serving qua service but a broader realignment of motivation toward the overall improvement of humankind--perhaps that's part of how we can speak God's love language. I'm confident that there are some things that God probably prefers over others (no hitting is preferred, but if the best we can do is no killing, that's progress?), but He'll take what He can get. Then again, that's more of how I was approaching the question at the beginning, and I'm not one hundred percent certain that "God will accept this" is really the same as saying "this is what God wants". And, of course, there are plenty of people who interpret God's desires and wills differently: Westboro Baptist Church is just one extreme example. (This is why, incidentally, I'm not a huge fan of moral relevancy arguments, since the idea that the WBC is "right" because "if they believe in it, it's right" cannot possibly be squared with a "love one another" commandment.) Maybe that's why it's so tricky: I can see, from my tradition, what God loves. But maybe God actually loves people facing Mecca and praying five times a day. Or maybe God actually loves those who worship Him on Saturday instead of Sunday. Or maybe…or maybe… It's interesting to think that a desire to worship God, in some ways, is a desire to understand what love language He speaks and listens in, while recognizing that, maybe it's less about what He wants and more about what we can do that really matters. I have to accept the possibility that what God wants in His love language is either far beyond what we imperfect and flawed humans can give, or it's so broad and all-encompassing that, like a parent who gushes over her four-year-old's latest spasmodic drawing, it genuinely is the thought that counts. Note: Because I already wrote up my thoughts about the differences/similarities between the film and the anime of Ghost in the Shell, I decided to write this essay about the manga (comic) written by Shirow Masamune back in 1991.
Having been a mild fan of Ghost in the Shell anime and a milder appreciator of Ghost in the Shell movie, I wanted to check out the genesis of the story. My local library, fortunately, had a copy of the first volume of The Ghost in the Shell manga (which has the definitive article at the beginning of the title…I rather prefer it without, personally). Excited, I went to request it out of the closed stacks, since the comic is pretty intense and the librarians didn't want it out on the normal shelves. When I talked to the librarian about getting it out of the closed stacks, she came back rather confused. "The placeholder is in there, not the book. I don't know where it is. I'll put a trace on it, and, when it comes back, we'll notify you." Disappointed, I nodded and gave her my information. I assumed that I wouldn't be reading that book; if it hadn't been returned in so long (it was far past the due date by this point), I didn't have a lot of hope that it would show up again. A couple of months passed. I had a stack of books I needed to return to the library, so I used some of my prep time and drove down to the library. "I made the right choice," I said to myself as I pulled into work. Having dropped the books off before school, I wouldn't have to head down to the library afterwards and I would be able to head straight home and get out of my dress shirt and tie (I hate wearing a dress shirt and tie). Partway through the day, I got a phone call from the library: They'd found the manga and it was awaiting me. Right choice, indeed. I found my way there a couple of days later, checked it out, and just finished reading it. Now, part of the reason that I share this anecdote before I jump into the book is in part because the book, particularly at the end, deals with connections (because it was written in the early nineties, the Net), but it also is concerned with memetic residue. The idea of using a network to notify an authority about a missing meme, only to have that authority somehow return with it…well, that seems to fit into the world of The Ghost in the Shell. The manga, naturally enough, differs quite a bit from the anime. I've watched the new movie, the original film, as well as the Arise mini-series (since that was available on Netflix). The lattermost is a type of prequel, showing how Major Motoko ended up with her team, the men featured in the anime film. What surprised me about the manga as opposed to this other type is that the tone of the original anime inspired the tone of the prequels. Masamune's tone and style in the manga are much more light-hearted. Anime and manga, it seems, are on a spectrum of absolute silliness and absurdity on one hand and move through to immensely serious without any of the whimsical facial expressions, awkward chuckles, or massive sweat droplets coming down their faces when they're embarrassed. The Ghost in the Shell, at least in the beginning, ranges toward the middle of this spectrum, where the action and stakes are really serious--as is the violence, which is distressingly graphic--while the less intense moments are much more lighthearted. Take, for example, a moment early on in the first issue. As we're getting to know the Major in a high-stakes hostage situation, things go south and the Major has to improvise to get the job done. Once victorious, she gets debriefed, first by her own superior, then by the frog-faced Minister of Internal Affairs. Once the Minister explains that her behavior on the mission has compromised his willingness to give her a requested special-ops team, she hijacks the telecommunication connection between her and the Minister, takes over his body, and has the Minister punch himself in the face. It's unexpected, hilarious, and much more lighthearted than the uber-serious animes and movie. Additionally, Masamune takes longer to get to his deep, psychological, philosophical mind-job than the anime does. There are elements throughout each issue that were coopted for the film(s), with much of the main themes taken from Issue 9, "Bye-bye Clay". It's in this one the Puppeteer is introduced, a self-aware AI that has taken over a female cyborg body and tried to run away. The concept of what life could be is introduced here, with the Puppeteer insisting that he is a self-generated, spontaneous lifeform, for he came into existence without design or plan, but out of the informational primordial soup (as it were) of the Net. Before "Bye-bye Clay", most issues were more episodic, not fully building off of one or the other, but being a "slice of life" in the world of Major Motoko Kusanagi as she hunts down terrorists and stops evil plots. After Issue 9, there's still some episodic moments, but the Puppeteer has hijacked the subconscious of Motoko and, therefore, the series. By the end of Volume 1, the Puppeteer is back and is connected to Motoko in an even deeper way. But it's "Bye-bye Clay" that really interests me, in part because it's fun to see where the ideas of the film came from. Additionally, there are pieces of what's happening that are easier to understand in the manga than I could pick up in the anime. I don't know if it's a translation issue or what, but it's been hard for my feeble brain to fully "get" what the many iterations of The Ghost in the Shell is talking about. First of all, the name of the issue is important. The Puppeteer--a self-identified masculine entity inside a naked female cyborg's body--tells the startled authorities that they will never find the body of the original Puppeteer "Because there never was a body." He goes on to say, "As a self-aware life-form--a ghost--I formally request political asylum." The heads of the two Sections both appear startled: "What? A ghost?" This is the phrase that's used throughout the series to indicate the innately human part of the transhuman future that's depicted. With cyborg enhancements (in the case of the strong-man Batou) or a fully cyborg body with a human intelligence in it (the Major), this concept of a "ghost in the (machine's) shell" is one of the ways in which humans justify their treatment of non-sentient AI. Though Masamune doesn't depict anything explicit, it's not uncommon to have nubile, scantily clad women adorning the backgrounds--and sometimes foregrounds--of some of the characters. They're usually the "bad guy" of the issue, with these sexy women often used as a shorthand to show the debauchery of the enemy. But these are never real women; they're cyborgs, designed (as shown in Issue 5, "Megatech Machine 2: The Making of a Cyborg") for a specific--if implicit--purpose. With this blurring of line between human and robot, it's clear that the "ghost" is a crucial point of definition. What is life? What is a human? If it's some form of autonomous sentience, then the Puppeteer is alive. Is he human? Does he have a ghost? It's hard to say. After all, he has said goodbye to the clay of the human body--hence the importance of the title. And his later conversation with the Major about replication and diversity also shows there's a desire for self-preservation and reproduction--both of them digital--which points even more firmly to the idea of the Puppeteer is alive. Perhaps Masamune is pointing at the idea that to be alive is to have a ghost, and whence that ghost comes is immaterial. Part of what I really liked about this manga is that it invites so many important questions in a way that is not only entertaining, but provide grist for additional interrogation. Nothing shows this quite like the final issue. The end of the volume has the Major walking into a new world without Section 9, her previous home, and in a new body. In some ways, it's the problem of the ship of Theseus. What makes the Major, the Major? What makes me, me? Am I a ghost in a clay shell…or am I something more? Emotional Diet
As I winded down on my annual rereading of Things Fall Apart, I ended up discussing some really interesting things with my students. Usually, TFA is a tricky book to teach. The first hundred and twenty-five pages are episodic and low on plot as Chinua Achebe shares the culture, customs, and beliefs of the Ibo people. Additionally, Okonkwo is a jerk, so there isn't a lot of empathy that's quickly generated. As the book goes on, however, students start to see the universal humanity that a book like this creates, as well as the ways in which Okonkwo's anger becomes his only outlet. This led one of my students to draw a parallel about eating. I'm paraphrasing here, but he essentially asked what a person would be like if they only ate one thing for her entire life--in his example, a sandwich. One part of me wanted to joke that that person would fit right in with my family and their picky-eating habits. But instead of the joke, I instead reflected on his point: We have a variety of nutrients that we glean through different foods; we likewise have a variety of emotions that we glean through different experiences and media, and supping too often from the same emotion can lead to a mental imbalance in the same way a body can become malnourished. That concept is a new one to me, or at least, in this context. If nothing else, it helps me to see something that I've long puzzled over but could never quite solve: Why do I study the World Wars when I know how much it depresses me? I recently proposed two new courses at work, one of world philosophy and one of the World Wars (First in the first semester and Second in the second). My wife was shocked that I would do that, since I hate war and I hate the suffering that happened and I hate how sad I get. But I felt like I should propose that course, since I know a lot* about the Wars and I should share that expertise. I created a Winterim specifically to get me (and as many students as I could) to see some of the sights and walk through the places where the victims of both World Wars once trod. In fact, I still regret not being able to make it to Verdun--and I likely always will--because I have chosen to make Verdun matter to me. It's painful, but it's important. But that's hard to express when I also hate the World Wars. I hate the hatred, I hate the sicknesses, the sadness, the misery, the starvation, the callousness and hardening of people's hearts. So why do I gravitate toward it? Why am I trying hard to finish The Last of the Doughboys so that I can read the books I bought on the Somme and Verdun? What's wrong with me? I think there is an emotional diet, and just like the nutritional metabolism of people and how it's different, there are varieties of what each person needs to consume. In the case of the Wars, it provides an emotional consumption that I need and can't get in other areas. But that's just for me. For some people, highly sentimental and--I use this word cautiously--cheesy movies (I'm thinking of the Hallmark Channel type films, what Kent Brockman from The Simpsons would call, "Stories that warm the heart, and fog the mind") are where they get a great sense of emotional worth. For me, they're insufferable. I can say the same about humus. So if we do have emotional diets, then suddenly preferences for types of stories and media start making sense. I talked about Pacific Rim and how it's my favorite genre. It's not for everybody--and I get that--but now I can see it as a piece of my emotional diet that is satisfying to me. This is more than preference, by the way, or mere opinion. Nutritional diets are necessary for survival, and I think the same can be said for emotional ones. I think there are certain needs that can only be satisfied in certain ways, and one of the dark needs that people need satisfaction on is violence. Not to retread too much about what I've said before, but I think that "violence at its most extreme--and its most harmless" (Wark) is part of video game culture because a big portion of an emotional diet relates to how we view and participate in violence. As our culture, as a whole, has become less tolerant of violence, we no longer consume that emotional catharsis that violence can portray--revulsion, vengeance, justice, or pleasure--save in our media. So violent video games provide one resource for that emotional appetite. But, like any diet, there are dangers in surfeiting on the "food". Emotional obesity is a possibility and a danger--too much of, as Shakespeare says, a good thing can become a problem. Overindulgence in the emotion of anger--whether it's more safely consumed on film or more dangerously imbibed in personal relationships--can lead to a person becoming a rage-aholic. I think of the alt-right cheerleader, Alex Jones, as well as the late founder of the Westboro Baptist Church, and I see two men whose diets--at least, publicly--of emotion rely exclusively on indignation and rage. In them, I see an emotional obesity. And I think there are different qualities of emotion, just like there are different levels of healthfulness in food. Junk food can be filling and quick, but it has lasting, long-term consequences. Eating healthful food--experiencing healthy emotions--requires a balance and careful consideration. The parallel goes even further: Allergies, intolerances, and bad reactions to food are all seen in emotional consumption. Sometimes, the allergic emotional reaction comes because of programing: Taboos could be a good example of that. And cultural tastes come into play as well, showing that, despite the universality of food (and emotion), expressing, consuming, and understanding them can have local variations. In the case of Okonkwo, he supped full on the most "masculine" of emotions he could find--anger--and ate of it almost exclusively. This, in the end, left him burned out and, sadly, hanging from a tree. The next question is, what does my emotional diet look like? And how can I improve it? --- * Okay, a lot for a lay person. One could study either war for a lifetime and, just before dying, hear a story that hadn't been heard before. There were too many people involved, too many experiences for a single person to know it all. And I know more about these conflicts than the average person on the street, I think. I certainly know more than what almost any of my students knows when they walk in, though there are exceptions. In the mid-1880s, time was invented.
Time, of course, had been around for a long time before then, what with things being born, living, dying, all beneath a sun that passed overhead throughout the day and settled into the horizon for a nightly nap. Clocks have been around since pretty much forever--provided you accept a sun-dial as a clock--but the idea of accurately measuring our arbitrary decisions for how long an hour, minute, and second would be has easily been familiar throughout the medieval period and well into the Renaissance. Watches were set back when it meant that someone would stand and watch, with those segments of time being roughly divided throughout the night. So in the mid-1880s, time was not invented. Time was invented by the Big Bang, then. But, still, in the mid-1880s, time was invented and, unsurprisingly, it was the British who decided to make it. Even less surprisingly is that they decided to make it according to what time it was in Greenwich, thus giving us Greenwich Mean Time. (What is surprising is that, given that just over a century had elapsed since the colonies revolted, yet the decision happened at an international conference in Washington, D.C.) The idea of standardized time is interesting to me, and it's even more interesting to me that there was a localized way of telling time that was perfectly sufficient until technological evolution and the irresistible pressure of market forces railroaded the way we tell time into uniform chunks. As Dr. Yuval Noah Harari points out in his book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, time is visibly ubiquitous for us nowadays. We glance at clocks strapped to our wrists, visible on our phones, mounted on our walls, and sometimes two different places on our dashboards whilst driving. This sort of obsession with time--and the perverse mantra of "time is money"--has been tickling at me. I'm well aware of "the" time, the "times", and what time I have left, but it interests me that this sort of thinking is so deeply engrained. Harari's book looks at a lot of different aspects of the history of humankind, and many of his conclusions are surprising. While I don't fully agree with a lot of what he has to say, I do like the way in which he explores complicated subjects (though perhaps too tersely on occasion). One of the things that he's brought to my attention is the manifold ways in which "natural" is anything but. We naturally assume that time is divided up the way we've been taught, its ubiquity its proof. We naturally assume that the way we dress, think, communicate is all inherent. The fact that it's not is no profound declaration, but the power of "natural" concepts is so alluring that we have a hard time not using it as explanations for modes of behavior. This gets particularly tricky when we think of things that we want to label as "unnatural"--at least, if we're aware of hypocrisy. The very action of labeling something is to use an arbitrary set of muscular contractions and exhalations of air through the vocal chords (or the complex muscular symphony needed to write), forcing the body into all sorts of behaviors in order to generate the sound that is decoded by others as the label. There's nothing inherently natural in language, save that we humans want to communicate. But language isn't inherent. Neither are clothes, watches, or almost anything else we do. The idea that we're capable of so much is because of our natural selves being overpowered by our social selves, which can be really encouraging when we're viewing progress, and really distressing when we see regression. If I'm being honest, my pessimistic side is saying that we're in a regressive mode right now. This whole deconstruction of language, as I mentioned before, isn't new or impossibly profound. In fact, I choose deconstruction because that's what a lot of postmodern thinking is all about--relying on the unreliability of language to draw greater conclusions about ourselves and the world around us. Still, it's something that's been grinding my gears more than usual. Perhaps it's because the duty of determining meaning is much sharper thanks to this type of interpretation, and the onus of choosing meaning can get wearing. Maybe it's because I no longer get to have conversations about this sort of thing on the reg, like I did back in college, so I'm feeling a touch nostalgic (it being finals and all). Or, maybe, it was just time to write it down, even if it doesn't contribute to any significant conversation. There's been a trend in some of the philosophies that students bring to my classroom that doesn't, at first glance, make sense to me. I've picked it up slowly as the years have turned, seeing it here or there but never anything consistent. And maybe I'm showing off my own ignorance, but I don't even know what kind of philosophy it is. I hear it most from the more libertarian minded in my classes, but the issue doesn't crop up in the more straightforward libertarian arguments--though, again, I may have simply neglected my libertarian philosophies to the point that I'm missing what others have noticed (and maybe even advocated for).
What I'm talking about is the idea that knowledge of something modifies its morality. It's hard for me to really express because I don't fully understand it, but the gist of it is that an action is neither good nor bad but can only be judged by the thoroughness of the knowledge of the action by the actor. The example where this comes up the most frequently is when I talk about child soldiers.* I ask who should be allowed to fight in a war, and invariably this strain of philosophy shows up. "If the kid knows what he's doing (it's always a he in these examples), then that's fine. He should be allowed to fight." The underpinning logic is that fighting is okay if the combatants know what's going on, what's happening. What's so strange to me is that 1) this argument makes an assumption that a child is capable of understanding the impact, import, and dangers of war; and 2) the assumption that anyone is capable of understanding the impact, import, and dangers of war. Now, I know marginally more than most of my students about the two largest conflicts in history, so I'm aware of some details that they likely aren't. But both of those assumptions feel dangerous to me. The first one should be rather apparent: Kids don't have a lot of understanding of much of anything. Even teenagers that I work with have pretty large blind spots that they don't recognize they have. (It reminds me of the joke that we should send soldiers out to war at the age of sixteen: not only are they invincible and will never die, but their moms won't cry when they leave.) And I'm not saying that to undersell children: They're filled with an energy and a conception of the world that is refreshing in its innocence and uniqueness. But I have a hard time believing that a nine year old is mentally equipped with the mental fortitude of being able to fight in a war of his or her own volition. The second one is more nuanced. I've studied war quite a bit, and I know that, while every person reacts to the stresses and dangers of the battlefield differently, there is a lot of pain that comes through fighting. One of my professors once said that 98% of the men who go into war come back insane; the other 2% were crazy before they left. While I'm not certain about that statistic (which I think he was stating more to prove a point than give actual numbers), war will permanently change a person. I served an LDS mission to Florida, and though the purpose of it was drastically different than being sent off to war, the post-mission me has little patience for the hilariously-mislabeled course taught in Institutes and chapels around the world: Mission Preparation class. Being prepared for a religious mission like those that an LDS missionary goes through has some to do with knowing doctrine and being familiar with the scriptures--particularly Bible quotes--and a bit more to do with knowing how to take care of oneself. But being "prepared" for the strains of a mission? Nope. Doesn't happen--at least, not in my experience. Obviously, I'm only speaking for myself, but what can one's upbringing do to prepare one to see the world lived differently than what's always been known? I was still in the USA, but the culture shock of going from Utah to Florida was enough to leave me off kilter for weeks when I first arrived. Nothing in a class could have prepared me for the feelings--inadequacy and depression one minute, elation and enthusiasm the next--or the temperature or anything that I was asked to do as a missionary. The gap between expectation and reality is something that can't really be addressed sans experience. And that's why I don't understand the argument very well. "If you know what you're getting yourself into, it's fine." So, ignorance is where immorality is? I mean, I do believe that it's an ethical duty for a person to learn--that we're obligated to improve ourselves--but I'm not confident that moral rectitude comes from choosing something (anything) because of understanding it beforehand. As I'm thinking about this, a parallel that I wish I would have thought of popped into my head. Since I only considered this now, I haven't said this to my students, but I think it's worth positing: What if we change what the child soldiers are being asked to do? What if, instead of saying that they're soldiers fighting in a war to save their country, they're instead whoring themselves out to save their country? Would we look at an eight year old girl being pimped out as an okay action, provided "she knew what she was getting into when she started"? The parallel isn't perfect: Sex and violence, though often invoked together, aren't binaries. And even though I try to be sex positive and refrain from judging adults who have made the conscious choice to be sex workers, there's no way that I would consider pedophilia as morally permissible simply because of the "consent" of the child. Now, I recognize that age eighteen is an arbitrary number, and there are legal (and biological) things going on that give us a number approximately less than a quarter through life expectancy as when we reach "adulthood". That's its own issue--and, as I mentioned before, I don't know that some of these large, important, sometimes painful issues can be properly understood outside of experiencing them--that may (or may not) have a bearing on the argument. I have to say, I'm not really a fan of the idea of exculpatory knowledge. But maybe that's just because I don't understand… …and maybe that's the entirety of the problem. --- *This conversation is inspired by the death of Gavroche in Les Miserables. In the text of the story, the gamin is eager to fight at the barricade, then, out of his own free will and choice (despite only being about eight or nine years old), scurrying out to collect ammunition for his citizen-comrades. In the process of pilfering the corpses, Gavroche is gunned down. Because there's a real-world problem with child soldiers, I use the novel as an avenue into teaching and talking to them about the issue. |
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