I have felt more and more like a fish out of water throughout this last semester, especially the discussions in my senior ethics seminar for the sociology/anthropology major. Maybe I’m outgrowing my tank, or at least just getting restless. I’ve written this paper thousands of times before; I’ve read that book millions of times already. I practically know it by heart. My mind has burned out. I need to take action to replace the fuse.
This all started back in Anthro Theory two years ago. I recalled to the sophomores at the Quo Vadis retreat how
Ideals to Action? This moment could have endeared me to the bright and airy principles of my chosen college; but these first inklings of frustration actually distanced me from the institution and anything involving the mission statement. I didn’t believe a word of it. But it suddenly occurred to me to figure out a way that I could say honestly and forgivingly: Ideals to Action—My Way. Now, I have gotten something valuable out of my St. Olaf education:
In many ways knowing by heart seems hazardous. I am aware that knowing by heart makes me susceptible to the kind of conservatism that runs in my Swanson bloodline, the stubborn-mule-with-blinders-on conservatism that only reads books written by people from its own camp. It also puts me in danger of being ostracized, or of shutting others out, because of the intensely personal understandings I hold toward everything I claim to understand at all.
I have written so many different kinds of papers with the invisible subtitle “Who I Am and What That Means.” In my current state of frustrated upheaval I am trying desperately to squeeze something newer and deeper out of that invisible subtitle for this last paper. I’ll start by describing the fixtures in this fishbowl that have rubbed my scales raw.
SPEAKING ANTHROPOLOGY
The problem with getting a bunch of anthropologists together is that we all speak the same language. This might seem advantageous, but when the common tongue was created to deal with language barriers, the resulting intellectual atmosphere is implosive. Collectively we have struggled to be meta-critical.
Instead, we wax regular-critical about class and gender divisions, liminality, performativity, legitimization, dominant discourses, social construction…! (Microsoft Word doesn’t even recognize many of these terms, and neither would, as Liz pointed out once, many of the subjects of study.) Frankly, we’re bullshitting ourselves. I’d rather talk about our circumstances in street-talk and four-letter words, ground them in actual experience, because (believe it or not) ideas do exist in the colloquial Everyday, and hypotheticals will always be too far away.
LABELING
I am not a feminist. Because I don’t want to be associated with the heavy connotations of the word. Because I actively disagree with many alleged feminist methods of achieving goals I only half-agree with. Because if I can’t define a feminist, how can I say if I am one or not? I want to be consistent, and if you want to know what I think about women’s role in society we can sit and chat about it and you’ll get a more valid snapshot. The same goes for religion and social policy. My positions are more complicated than a single word.
This is why my classmates chose Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism as my required reading personality. Liberals and conservatives may argue, Oles and Carls may fight, but “when the stranger is no longer imaginary, but real and present, sharing a human social life, you may like or dislike him, you may agree or disagree; but, if it is what you both want, you can make sense of each other in the end” (99).
I am the product of a mixed-up world, and at this point I see little value in discussing the merits and disadvantages of globalization. I understand why we need to generalize and categorize, because we cannot individually understand the 6 billion-plus other people on this planet. But to me the One-in-a-Million contains infinite potential, which fades when people are reduced to millions.
GUILT
My aunt mentioned once that she has always been frustrated with my dad for being so “good.” Her husband, who met my dad before they both quit medical school, said he is one of the kindest people he knows in an unkind world.
Growing up in my father’s shadow, tinged by the lingering self-regulation of evangelical Christianity, I have spent a lot of time feeling guilty. I also spent a lot of time being exploited because I would rather be trampled than trample. I recently recognized that my enormous burden of guilt has been weighing me down to the point that I can hardly move or act. The danger in shedding it, though, is in forgetting to care if my actions hurt the people around me.
After spending years developing wariness toward feeling guilty, I read Jamaica Kincaid. Guilt and ethics tangle together so easily. Naomi Klein points out that, “particularly in the United States, particularly on elite college campuses, there is so much privilege that we mistakenly believe that guilt is the best motivator” (Global Values 101, p.110). A Small Place bears a huge load of bitterness—and so immediately my hackles raised. As if I haven’t committed enough terrible deeds on a small scale, now I have to take on centuries’ worth of colonial guilt on top of that?! I decided to let myself off the hook. I feel bad about these things, but what can I really do about them? Not, perhaps, the best way to start out an ethics seminar.
I need to hear Paul Farmer legitimize the “small victories” (Global Values 101, p.236) because I can’t conceptualize big ones—at least, not yet. I split up even routine tasks into smaller checkpoints because otherwise I freeze in the face of the insurmountable. Right now, I have to imagine myself happy to say at the end of my life, “I have loved and been loved by a lot of individuals, and although we have failed each other many times, we have also forgiven.” I will not drive a gas-guzzler or leave the faucet on all day, but I can’t expect myself to spawn the Idea that will singlehandedly end world hunger and global warming—and that if I don’t, it would have been better had I not been born.
Sometimes even my responsibilities to my loves can be too taxing. I can only make so many sacrifices before I cease to exist.
RELATIONSHIPS
I care about people. I care deeply about how we treat each other, how we coexist. I feel mildly devastated whenever a relationship goes sour or even when it fades. I am protective of my friends but I try to let them fight their own battles. I am surprised when someone lets me down, and I almost always ache to give them another chance. I can usually appreciate multiple vantage points conflicting on an issue, especially relationship negotiations.
For a long time I forgot this simple fact, but I started to remember again around the time we read Righteous Dopefiend. I felt conflicted about our class discussions judging the moral and ethical negotiations Philippe Bourgois and Jeff Schonberg faced within their research. Steven Lukes poses “a direct conflict between what core morality requires and what a particular moral code requires of its adherents” (Moral Relativism, p.144). Under the circumstances, juxtaposing the “ethnographers’ culture” with the “dopefiends’ culture” seemed far too simplistic given their profound personal relationships.
As I think about setting off into the World Beyond [St. Olaf], I cling to the idea of Community. Small towns with close-knit neighborhoods. Community: where we look out for each other like dopefiends, where we depend on our neighbors like the Kabre, where we care about impacting our habitat the way Bill McKibben suggests (over and over and over again) in Deep Economy.
TO LIVE BY HEART
I have (almost) learned to know by heart, though my frustration hints that I am perhaps just shy of enlightenment. I am anxious now to act by heart, to internalize my values and principles so that I don’t get caught in an eddy of ethical thought experiment each time I have to make a decision. So that my moral and ethical code becomes my habitus. So that I am standing firmly rooted in my essence of being, but able to roll with the kicks and punches. I want someone to need me to express my ideas about marginalization and agency in four-letter words, high fives and unself-conscious hugs. I want to act by heart so that nobody has to ask, “Are you a feminist?” Because it will be obvious.
The thing about hearts is that they break. They always hide there inside our chests, but they still get splintered, pierced and shattered. A person who cares must constantly respond to changing circumstances within the surrounding social environment. Complacency does not stick easily to this person.
I have forgotten how to do this, and Janelle Taylor suggests I might not be alone in my selective dementia. Under the pressure to “make a difference,” to “change the world,” to convert the ignorant to socially- and environmentally-responsible ways of living, I have forgotten how it feels simply to care.
Setting forth from here, I cannot simply order myself to be compassionate and have it be done. I couldn’t even tell you what I would do in a specific situation; I could say what I would like to do, but I’d rather not waste my time on thought experiments. I wrestle every day with the balance between protecting myself from pain and leaving myself open to new beauties. But I can continue to practice and continue to struggle, and do my best to live by heart.
This all started back in Anthro Theory two years ago. I recalled to the sophomores at the Quo Vadis retreat how
I was suddenly buckling under the weight of a looming lifetime of responsibilities and expectations. Suddenly all my unstable idealistic conclusions fell apart, nothing seemed certain, and I was left in a directionless void of moral relativism.
In my frustration I wrote a pretty angsty journal entry declaring my decision to do classes for myself, to root these airy theories in my own life experiences, to write what I wanted to write. I waxed poetic about the fact that none of my professors seemed to share my goals and standards for my schoolwork, and I was overwhelmed. At the time, I actually hadn’t articulated any of my own goals or standards, but I felt for the first time ready to think about what I wanted out of my education.
Ideals to Action? This moment could have endeared me to the bright and airy principles of my chosen college; but these first inklings of frustration actually distanced me from the institution and anything involving the mission statement. I didn’t believe a word of it. But it suddenly occurred to me to figure out a way that I could say honestly and forgivingly: Ideals to Action—My Way. Now, I have gotten something valuable out of my St. Olaf education:
I have learned to know by heart.
In many ways knowing by heart seems hazardous. I am aware that knowing by heart makes me susceptible to the kind of conservatism that runs in my Swanson bloodline, the stubborn-mule-with-blinders-on conservatism that only reads books written by people from its own camp. It also puts me in danger of being ostracized, or of shutting others out, because of the intensely personal understandings I hold toward everything I claim to understand at all.
I have written so many different kinds of papers with the invisible subtitle “Who I Am and What That Means.” In my current state of frustrated upheaval I am trying desperately to squeeze something newer and deeper out of that invisible subtitle for this last paper. I’ll start by describing the fixtures in this fishbowl that have rubbed my scales raw.
SPEAKING ANTHROPOLOGY
The problem with getting a bunch of anthropologists together is that we all speak the same language. This might seem advantageous, but when the common tongue was created to deal with language barriers, the resulting intellectual atmosphere is implosive. Collectively we have struggled to be meta-critical.
Instead, we wax regular-critical about class and gender divisions, liminality, performativity, legitimization, dominant discourses, social construction…! (Microsoft Word doesn’t even recognize many of these terms, and neither would, as Liz pointed out once, many of the subjects of study.) Frankly, we’re bullshitting ourselves. I’d rather talk about our circumstances in street-talk and four-letter words, ground them in actual experience, because (believe it or not) ideas do exist in the colloquial Everyday, and hypotheticals will always be too far away.
LABELING
I am not a feminist. Because I don’t want to be associated with the heavy connotations of the word. Because I actively disagree with many alleged feminist methods of achieving goals I only half-agree with. Because if I can’t define a feminist, how can I say if I am one or not? I want to be consistent, and if you want to know what I think about women’s role in society we can sit and chat about it and you’ll get a more valid snapshot. The same goes for religion and social policy. My positions are more complicated than a single word.
This is why my classmates chose Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism as my required reading personality. Liberals and conservatives may argue, Oles and Carls may fight, but “when the stranger is no longer imaginary, but real and present, sharing a human social life, you may like or dislike him, you may agree or disagree; but, if it is what you both want, you can make sense of each other in the end” (99).
I am the product of a mixed-up world, and at this point I see little value in discussing the merits and disadvantages of globalization. I understand why we need to generalize and categorize, because we cannot individually understand the 6 billion-plus other people on this planet. But to me the One-in-a-Million contains infinite potential, which fades when people are reduced to millions.
GUILT
My aunt mentioned once that she has always been frustrated with my dad for being so “good.” Her husband, who met my dad before they both quit medical school, said he is one of the kindest people he knows in an unkind world.
Growing up in my father’s shadow, tinged by the lingering self-regulation of evangelical Christianity, I have spent a lot of time feeling guilty. I also spent a lot of time being exploited because I would rather be trampled than trample. I recently recognized that my enormous burden of guilt has been weighing me down to the point that I can hardly move or act. The danger in shedding it, though, is in forgetting to care if my actions hurt the people around me.
After spending years developing wariness toward feeling guilty, I read Jamaica Kincaid. Guilt and ethics tangle together so easily. Naomi Klein points out that, “particularly in the United States, particularly on elite college campuses, there is so much privilege that we mistakenly believe that guilt is the best motivator” (Global Values 101, p.110). A Small Place bears a huge load of bitterness—and so immediately my hackles raised. As if I haven’t committed enough terrible deeds on a small scale, now I have to take on centuries’ worth of colonial guilt on top of that?! I decided to let myself off the hook. I feel bad about these things, but what can I really do about them? Not, perhaps, the best way to start out an ethics seminar.
I need to hear Paul Farmer legitimize the “small victories” (Global Values 101, p.236) because I can’t conceptualize big ones—at least, not yet. I split up even routine tasks into smaller checkpoints because otherwise I freeze in the face of the insurmountable. Right now, I have to imagine myself happy to say at the end of my life, “I have loved and been loved by a lot of individuals, and although we have failed each other many times, we have also forgiven.” I will not drive a gas-guzzler or leave the faucet on all day, but I can’t expect myself to spawn the Idea that will singlehandedly end world hunger and global warming—and that if I don’t, it would have been better had I not been born.
Sometimes even my responsibilities to my loves can be too taxing. I can only make so many sacrifices before I cease to exist.
RELATIONSHIPS
I care about people. I care deeply about how we treat each other, how we coexist. I feel mildly devastated whenever a relationship goes sour or even when it fades. I am protective of my friends but I try to let them fight their own battles. I am surprised when someone lets me down, and I almost always ache to give them another chance. I can usually appreciate multiple vantage points conflicting on an issue, especially relationship negotiations.
For a long time I forgot this simple fact, but I started to remember again around the time we read Righteous Dopefiend. I felt conflicted about our class discussions judging the moral and ethical negotiations Philippe Bourgois and Jeff Schonberg faced within their research. Steven Lukes poses “a direct conflict between what core morality requires and what a particular moral code requires of its adherents” (Moral Relativism, p.144). Under the circumstances, juxtaposing the “ethnographers’ culture” with the “dopefiends’ culture” seemed far too simplistic given their profound personal relationships.
As I think about setting off into the World Beyond [St. Olaf], I cling to the idea of Community. Small towns with close-knit neighborhoods. Community: where we look out for each other like dopefiends, where we depend on our neighbors like the Kabre, where we care about impacting our habitat the way Bill McKibben suggests (over and over and over again) in Deep Economy.
TO LIVE BY HEART
I have (almost) learned to know by heart, though my frustration hints that I am perhaps just shy of enlightenment. I am anxious now to act by heart, to internalize my values and principles so that I don’t get caught in an eddy of ethical thought experiment each time I have to make a decision. So that my moral and ethical code becomes my habitus. So that I am standing firmly rooted in my essence of being, but able to roll with the kicks and punches. I want someone to need me to express my ideas about marginalization and agency in four-letter words, high fives and unself-conscious hugs. I want to act by heart so that nobody has to ask, “Are you a feminist?” Because it will be obvious.
The thing about hearts is that they break. They always hide there inside our chests, but they still get splintered, pierced and shattered. A person who cares must constantly respond to changing circumstances within the surrounding social environment. Complacency does not stick easily to this person.
I have forgotten how to do this, and Janelle Taylor suggests I might not be alone in my selective dementia. Under the pressure to “make a difference,” to “change the world,” to convert the ignorant to socially- and environmentally-responsible ways of living, I have forgotten how it feels simply to care.
Setting forth from here, I cannot simply order myself to be compassionate and have it be done. I couldn’t even tell you what I would do in a specific situation; I could say what I would like to do, but I’d rather not waste my time on thought experiments. I wrestle every day with the balance between protecting myself from pain and leaving myself open to new beauties. But I can continue to practice and continue to struggle, and do my best to live by heart.
