Look Ma, I Can Fly!

Courtesy of Panopticist.

A Six-Foot Black Woman Who Says What She Means

For those not familiar with Ta-Nehisi Coates, blogger and writer for the Atlantic Monthly, I can recommend you to his blog.

And, additionally, to his recent profile of the soon-to-be First Lady, Michelle Obama, from the magazine itself:

In most black people, there is a South Side, a sense of home, that never leaves, and yet to compete in the world, we have to go forth. So we learn to code-switch and become bilingual. We save our Timberlands for the weekend, and our jokes for the cats in the mail room. Some of us give ourselves up completely and become the mask, while others overcompensate and turn every dustup into the Montgomery bus boycott.

But increasingly, as we move into the mainstream, black folks are taking a third road--being ourselves. Implicit in the notion of code-switching is a belief in the illegitimacy of blacks as Americans, as well as a disbelief in the ability of our white peers to understand us. But if you see black identity as you see southern identity, or Irish identity, or Italian identity--not as a separate trunk, but as a branch of the American tree, with roots in the broader experience--then you understand that the particulars of black culture are inseparable from the particulars of the country.

Pop culture has laid the groundwork for that recognition. Barack Obama's coalition--the young, the black, the urban, the hip--was originally assembled by hip-hop. Jay-Z and Nas may be problematic ambassadors, but their ilk are why those who thought Barack and Michelle were giving each other a "terrorist fist jab" were laughed off the stage. We are as physically segregated as ever, yet the changes in media have drawn black idiom into the broader American narrative.

[snip]

When I saw Obama in Chicago and took her for white, it was not because of her cadences, mannerisms, or dress, but because of the radical proposition she put forth--a black community fully vested, no DuBoisian veil, in the country at large. A buddy of mine once remarked that Michelle "makes Barack black." But that understates things. She doesn't simply make Barack black--she makes him American.

[snip]

These heralds offer a deeper understanding of African American life, a greater appreciation of the bourgeois ordinariness of our experience. “People have never met a Michelle Obama,” the soon-to-be first lady said toward the end of our interview. “But what they’ll come to learn is that there are thousands and thousands of Michelle and Barack Obamas across America. You just don’t live next door to them, or there isn’t a TV show about them.”

There is now.

There was some discussion during the primaries that Barack should find the opportunity for a Sister Souljah moment in order to distance himself from "blackness" or racial identity-based politics. There was also a certain mythology that merely the act of electing a black President would somehow magically heal certain lingering racial wounds in our society (allowing blacks to shed racial grievance, eliminate lingering white guilt).

One frequent suggestion was that Obama should campaign on a pledge to shift from race to class-based affirmative action policies. The thinking being (a la Nixon goes to China) that it will take a black Democrat to drive such changes through, since he will not be open to cheap charges of racism, given his personal identity.

For my money, I doubt that Obama will do any such thing, and moreover, I would hope that he would not. Any symbolic benefit to be obtained from him being our first black President is only going to be realized by his being an effective American President first and foremost, outside of simplistic racial classification. And, this is not because he must explicitly reject or negate any black identity, but rather that he simply needs to implicitly live it, as Coates notes, such that the "particulars of black culture are inseparable from the particulars of the country."

Any move he might make as President that reeks specifically as a self-conscious performance of his blackness, of using his racial identity (even if for presumed positive ends) as a political tool, will by definition retard any such objectives. At this stage, basic competence within the White House would be a massive step forward for the country in completely non-racial terms.

Or, as Chris Rock noted on Larry King Live:

KING: You must be … proud that at this stage in our history a black man is running for president on a major ticket.

ROCK: I’m proud Barack Obama [is] running for president... If it was Flavor Flav, would I be proud? No. I don’t support Barack Obama because he’s black.

KING: I said just as a proud feeling. That’s normal.

ROCK: There’s a proud feeling because of the character of the man.

I sincerely hope Rock is right, because with everything that is going to be on Obama's plate, we are going to need it.

On a side note, any of you who have seen me spend time with my own niece, Mahlia, will know that I have a soft spot for elementary-school and middle-school aged kids (like Miss Mahlia herself). I am not as naturally drawn to babies and teenagers, but I like kids a lot.

So, I am all in favor of the coming Cuteness Stimulus, as Yglesias has termed it:

Obama transition team acts to counter national cuteness deficit by posting photos of Sasha and Malia getting ready for their first day at school

If true, my wife may become Methuselah

Scientists discover pumpkin-pie-based cancer cure.

Our World is Upside Down

It strikes me that the principle difficulty facing traditional norms and values today is not liberal secular ideology (the right-wing radio boogeyman), but simply the rate of change in our world. When I was a child, I watched Captain Kirk say "Beam me up, Scotty" into his transponder. That was science fiction.

Today, I have an iPhone. Granted it doesn't do the full blown teleportation yet, but according to WikiPedia:

In August 2008, physicist Michio Kaku predicted in Discovery Channel Magazine that a teleportation device similar to those in Star Trek will be invented within 100 years.

So, the difficulty in passing on traditions to the next generation is that, other than certain basic ethical propositions (don't kill, steal, lie, etc.), the world today's children are going to have to navigate is going to be significantly different from that of their parents and light years different than that of their grandparents.

See Dreher for an anecdotal example:

The day I got my first paycheck in my first post-college job, I walked into my old campus saloon - the gang hardly recognized me in a suit - leaned on the bar and ordered a Heineken. Not a pitcher of whatever watery suds were on sale to the penurious undergraduates, whose wretched lot I shared only a few weeks earlier. Nope, I asked for an imported brand. And you know, for once I didn't have to worry about it.

That was 20 years ago. I don't know when I drank my last actual Heineken, but in a way, I've been a Heineken man ever since. That is, though I've never known wealth in my working life, I've also never had to do without, not in any serious way. There has always been money for Heineken. Live that way long enough, and you begin to think that the easy availability of Heineken is the natural order of things.

My father, he drinks whatever's on sale and doesn't care. That's his way. He was a child of the Great Depression. When I was a senior in high school, I tasted my first Heineken in, no kidding, Holland (cheap flights, a strong dollar - ah, 1984). When Daddy was a senior in high school, he installed the first indoor plumbing in his family's house.

Same planet, different worlds. [em: mine]

Economic dynamism loosens the relevancy of the past. The world changes, sometimes radically. In such circumstances, the wisdom and rituals of ones forefathers can seem less like the insight of the ages and more like old fuddy-duddyism that is simply out of touch with the times.

And, in such a chaotic environment, it is harder to implicitly teach the next generation simply "how to be," much less how to be successful or moral or wise. Not only are there not commonly agreed upon standards for what constitutes such behavior, but the very nature of society itself, and the demands it makes upon individuals, is constantly shifting.

And, gaping into such uncertainty can be daunting, decentering, and even disabling. A commenter on Dreher's blog captures the sense of cultural dislocation well:

(Caveat: I am Indian, so no scolding me about using the term "Indian"...that's what we call ourselves among ourselves).

Long ago, when Indian boys were very small, 5 or 6 maybe, their Dads made them a little set of bow and arrows. They used these to practice hunting. When they got a squirrel, or a rabbit, or even a little bird, they would take it solemnly to Mom. Their first kill was celebrated, no matter how small it was, and they were praised as hunters for anything they brought in to feed the family.

They were called "that MAN" when they did things like this, to build them up. And most importantly, ANYthing they brought in, the scrawniest little bird, a big deal was made about it, and right in front of everyone, the little morsel went right into the family cooking pot, alongside the deer or buffalo or anything else. It started that early, the work, the praise as men feeding the family. Yes, we men need that building up, from the earliest experiences. You would be surprised what proud words can do, or what the reverse can do to.

Now of course, little girls too were given miniatures of the tools they would use as women, would work alongside mom and grandma, learning to bead, to tan hides, making food, caring for the babies...this again from the age of 5 or 6. And they were also praised, and a big deal was made about the moccasins they made, and called "this WOMAN" even as a little girl when she did grownup work.

I contrast this with what I see when I see 18 year olds in this culture, doing horrible things, and people trying to keep them out of jail saying they didn't know any better, or they were so young. Doing terrible terrible things to each other. Unbelievable some of it. And all excused by parents, who want to be friends rather than parents.

If parents built up kids from the earliest age, 2 or 3, saying how proud they were when the kid did something good, was kind, picked up toys, made a big deal, that would be something. Not ignore them when everything is going ok, or act inconsistent. And when kids do bad, shame them, be disappointed, call them a "baby." Give them a rattle or a bottle. But then praise them again when they do good and call them a MAN or a WOMAN. That was how it was in the old traditional days among our Indian people. Back in the old days, sometimes kids even had to fight to protect their families, go to war, life and death.

I am really sad when I see the homeless kids. No one told them to be a MAN or a WOMAN was to help the family, be courteous to strangers, have self-respect. They think being a man or woman only means to have sex, to talk vulgar, drink, be violent, nasty, do drugs. That's not being a man or a woman. That is just being crazy (although now to many "crazy" means something good) and ugly. Teens want to be thought of as adults, it is a major thing. So how has it come to mean "adult" means sex and vulgarity, while taking care of yourself and others is "lame." Our world is upside down.

When the world is upside down, the old frameworks, standards, traditions no longer graft easily onto it. It becomes harder to always know where to turn, which direction to point ourselves, which way to guide our children. Many get lost.

And, according to Grant McCracken, it isn't likely to get any easier.

The original transformational power, once the property of gods, elders, and shamans, is now in civilian hands. Once collective, it is now individual, open to everyone. Once sacred, it is now profane. Once directed by the ceremonial calendar, it can now happen anywhere, anytime. Once strictly bound by tradition, it is now free, or at least freeform. When the power of transformation entered the profane world, it was exhuberantly transformed. Once this culture learned to give itself "bodies of another kind," it did not cease until it was capable of endless range and variety.

The price, of course, was high. Driving ritual from the temple cost us dearly. The punishment was the loss of an enchanted world that submitted to, that resonated with human designs. The universe became a chilly alienated, dislocating place. Good thing everyone now had their own powers of self-invention. They were going to need them.

The LizardMan Cometh

I wrote recently about Grant McCracken's new book: Transformations: Identity Construction in Contemporary Culture (see my overview of the thesis if need be).

In our postmodern world, individuals are taking more and more radical steps in personal transformation (not just through participation in sub-cultures, the rejection of social conventions, or the creation of new or modified public personas), even down to almost inconceivable changes of physical appearance, such as The LizardMan, Erik Sprague.

From McCracken:

Sprague has had more than 450 hours of tattooing to give his skin the appearance of scales. He had plastic surgery to install Teflon bumps in his forehead and to bifurcate his tongue. He has had his teeth filed to make them look like fangs.

On the heels of the successful mapping of the human genome, our collective future portends potential transformative capabilities beyond that which even the Erik Spragues of the world are presently tempted to dream. The nature of the some of the points of conflict is summarized below:

Another issue is whether scientists should seek to alter genetic structures to "improve" the human race. One of those who discovered the DNA structure, James Watson, is decidedly in favor of such action, the London Times reported April 24.

Watson, currently president of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York state, said that spurious objections from left-wing and religious groups were slowing the pace of the medical advances that rely on genetics. "I think you should be able to do all you can to improve human life," he said.

Addressing a gala dinner at London Guildhall, Watson commented: "I don't see genetics as offending the gods, as I don't think there are any gods out there." The Times also noted that Watson recently opposed a ban on human reproductive cloning. [em: mine]

Others are pointing out the dangers of tampering with human genetic structures. In an April 14 essay for the Los Angeles Times, Bill McKibbon, author of "Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age," welcomed the celebrations of the anniversary of the DNA discovery.

But he warned that "the latest plans of Watson and his followers are monstrous." Such schemes "look forward to a world of catalog children, who might spend their entire lives wondering which of their impulses are real and which the product of embryonic intervention. They replace the fate and the free will that always have been at the center of human meaning with a kind of genetic predestination that will leave our children as semi-robots."

He added: "A species smart enough to discover the double helix should be wise enough to leave it more or less alone."

Dr. Leon Kass is also wary of the trend toward genetic consumerism. Kass, chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics, addressed the issue in an essay in his recent book, "Life, Liberty and the Defense of Dignity: The Challenge for Bioethics."

Genetic technology, he observed, "comes into existence as part of the large humanitarian project to cure disease, prolong life and alleviate suffering. As such, it occupies the moral high ground of compassionate healing."

But this same technology, he noted, "also represents something radically new and disquieting." We should reject the attempts by some scientists to cast the debate about genetic technology as "a battle of beneficial and knowledgeable cleverness against ignorant and superstitious anxiety." [em: mine]

Genetic manipulation, Kass explained, is decisively different from other medical technologies. First, changes to human genetic structures will be transmissible into succeeding generations. Second, genetic engineering may be able to create or improve human capacities and therefore new norms of fitness and health.

Moreover, genetic technology and the practices it will engender are not morally and humanly neutral, Kass warned. Scientists will end up judging other beings' worthiness to live or die based on genetic information. And the temptation to produce designer babies will bring about the commodification of nascent human life. [em: mine]

We have only begun to scratch the surface of the moral conundrums that are embedded therein. And, one doesn't have to be a religious conservative to wonder about our capacity to wield such power with wisdom and care.

Wisdom is the right use of knowledge. To know is not to be wise. Many men know a great deal, and are all the greater fools for it. There is no fool so great a fool as a knowing fool. But to know how to use knowledge is to have wisdom.

- Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834 - 1892)

The Bum Rush

Courtesy of the Freakonomics blog, comes this revelation by Edward Conlon whose memoir Blue Blood recounts his experience as a Harvard-educated writer who joins the NYPD.

Conlon has been getting information from a homeless heroin addict named Charlie, regularly paying Charlie small sums of his own money in exchange for tips.

Charlie has a homeless friend named Tommy. One day on the street, Conlon runs into Tommy, who tells him a location where crack sales occur.

Conlon writes:

I handed Tommy some money, he held up his hands and said, “C’mon, Eddie, you don’t have to, it’s okay.” I said, “It’s all right, you guys work, you take risks for us, you should get paid.” He took the money, but he shook his head.

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but I feel a little funny, since you guys pay out of your own pockets. Do you know how much we make out here, panhandling, during rush hour?’

“No, how much?”

“About a dollar a minute.”

“Oh.”

I didn’t take my money back, but I saw his point. Charlie and Tommy made more money than us. I should have realized that earlier, as the math was not complicated — we took home less than a hundred dollars a day, while their habits were at least that.

I tried not to dwell on the fact that, economically, a New York City police officer was a notch down from a bum.

It is amazing when you think about it. Our society is so damn rich that even the bums are living large.

That is what Our Father said it was

UPDATE: I made slight modifications to the text to make my final point more clear.

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Just finished reading Transformations: Identity Construction in Contemporary Culture by Grant McCracken.

Difficult read in places, but paints a picture of the development of the concept of self-hood and how an individual can/cannot change within a culture through different "transformations" (e.g. rites of passage, for example) which demarcate modifications in the nature of the self.

I will probably have multiple entries on the book (since there is much richness to draw on), but I'll try to summarize the thesis broadly below. He describes our culture as transitioning from:

1. Traditional - Face-to-face societies where ritual and myth are the means of transformation. Only prescribed types of transformations are allowed. Individuals may not choose or invent their transformational routines.
2. Status - Hierarchical societies where individual station is defined by birth (e.g. class or caste systems). Individuals could endeavor to change their status by cultivating exteriors (clothing, speech, deportment) and interiors (thought, emotion, outlook) to create a convincing performance of the social self.
3. Modern - Beat poets (previewing the 60s social upheaval) declared war on status transformation and adopted an oppositional cultural stance against the pretensions of bourgeois society. Authenticity and the individual self were valued above (and were in conflict with) mainstream social norms. Even within the mainstream, modern faith in technology and progress depicted an evolutionary self, one with the capacity for self-directed change, that was always forward looking and unmoored from its past.
4. Postmodern - The self is porous, fluid and open to near complete self-determination. The individual claims the right of self-authorship and the right to change the cultural categories that define him/her. Moreover, the individual consists of many "selves" with an emphasis on exploration of multiplicity over singular authenticity.

In short, the portrait moves from a sense of selfhood that is defined and limited by the outer societal norms, to one where the self is free to become nearly anything that one can imagine.

Now, the thesis is NOT that we shifted through all 4 phases, one displacing the one prior, but that they are additive. We still have "traditional" forms (e.g. weddings, etc.) but the power of society to define and control those meanings is limited and even contested (e.g. Prop 8).

I found this quote regarding traditional societies to be an echo of many present day culture war issues:

The ruling ideas of a traditional society are truly sovereign. They discourage criticism, originality and the "disposition to change." They discourage the very concept of reform. As J.S. La Fontaine puts it, these societies "base their concept of society on the idea of tradition, established once and for all. Society is the projection over time of the original founders, heroes or ancestors."

[snip]

What does not serve the "traditional forms" of a society is not allowed to matter. For many of these societies it isn't wisdom unless it is received.

When questioned as to why a particular ceremonial activity is carried out in a particular way, Navajo singers will most often say, "because the kiyin dine - the Holy People - did it that way in the first place." The ultima ratio of non-literates tends to be "that is what our fathers said it was." [em: mine]

The quote above reminded me of this recent Dreher post on the schism within the Anglican church.

Damon is troubled, and understandably so, by the fact that American churches are breaking apart based on positions congregations and individuals within them hold on culture-war issues. I don't see how any serious believer, whichever side he takes, can be cheered by schism. But I am inclined to think of schism as the second-worst option, if the only other is to accommodate one's church to a serious heresy.

As Damon notes, the stance a believer takes on issues like abortion, homosexuality, order and authority in the family, and a related constellation of concerns, typically places one within one camp or the other. It's no accident that there's a thread connecting stances on both sides; i.e., there's a reason why Christians who oppose abortion rights are more likely to oppose same-sex marriage rights, and vice versa. It all comes down, in the end, to Authority. [em: original]

If you believe that Scripture, or Scripture and the institutional Church, is the Authority for deciding questions of meaning and morality, then you are far more likely to fall on the traditionalist side of these questions. If you believe that individual conscience is the Authority, then you are likely to be a progressive.

To Dreher, a social conservative, the ultima ratio on any such question comes down to: that is what Our Father said it was.