I Scattered My Mom's Ashes In The Ocean

I didn't have time to write a TKIN post, because I was too busy traveling to Cape Cod to scatter my mom's ashes.

If you're following along at home, my mom died about a year ago. You can read my post about her here. We had a small memorial for her at the time, but then last weekend a larger group of family members got together in Hyannis and took a small boat with a crew who knew all about the ashes scattering process.

It was an incredibly beautiful day, and here's a picture of me watching the ashes slowly disperse into the ocean:

Au revoir, Audrey!

Nothing Human Is Just Biology: Kid And Food Edition

About a year and a half ago, the New York Times ran this story by a mother whose baby girl Violet was born with a heart defect and who, as a result of complex treatments for that, ended up with another problem: she didn't eat.

You should read the whole story, because it is emotionally moving, intellectually sophisticated, and philosophically interesting. Basically, her daughter needed a temporary nasogastral feeding tube, and after that were various struggles to get her to eat. But she was so weak, she never could get more calories than she spent, and she grew to associate eating with pain and suffering. This aversion to eating was so severe that they had to continue with the tube.

Heartbreakingly, the tube intensified Violet's aversion to eating. Once a week it had to be changed; her parents had to hold her down while she screamed and cried and then they had to wait til she stopped to breath to try to get it down her throat. Horrible. Of course, after that, Violet didn't want anything near her mouth, ever. When Violet was around six months old, they put in a permanent tube directly into her stomach. As her mother says, "devastating." And also "a relief."

Not surprisingly, given modern medicine, Violet's story is common, and the essay discusses the various approaches experts take to try to reintroduce children to the feeling that eating is something they can and want to do. Many take a behavioral approach. Because a big part of "oral aversion" is the association between pain and food, a lot of this involves creating positive external associations with foods -- for example, associating successful eating with toys -- and reinforcement that eating is going to happen. When another child in treatment eats she gets rewarded; but when she spits out her food, the therapist feeds it back to her.

A slightly different approach involves trying to reconnect the child with the internal cues of hunger and pleasure. Of course, this is tricky and potentially dangerous, since you have to let the child feel hunger, which means you have to feed them, through the tube, less food than they need, which must be terrifying with a child whose health is already a bit shaky.

One of the interesting aspects of the latter approach is the idea that to associate food with pleasure, you have to let kids spit out food and not worry about it. Violet's mother describes how, when they were beginning, Violet would put a bit of food, and then eventually more food, into her mouth, and then -- instead of swallowing, she'd spit it all out. Frustrating! but the therapist says that spitting is an essential part of the process: it lets Violet know that she can spit it out, so it is safe to experiment with another bite.

The first time through, at this point in the story, I didn't really know how it was all going to turn out. Was Violet going to be able to eat? Before I got to the textual resolution of this question, I came across a photo accompanying the story. The photos before had all been of Violet with her tubes. But in this one, she had chocolate avocado pudding all over her face, with a huge smile because -- yes, she was eating it! The image brought tears to my eyes the first time, and then it did again an hour ago when I reread the story.

After getting Violet to disassociate food and pain and associate food with pleasure -- or, at least, curiosity -- they had to let Violet get hungrier and hungrier. But in the end, it worked. Like a month later, they're all out at a diner and Violet is scarfing down a grilled cheese sandwich.

This story came out in early 2016 but I think about it regularly, even now. Partly I guess it's because it's interesting and happy, which so few things are these days. But partly I think it's because it shows something important about human nature. That everything -- even something so seemingly straightforward as eating, transcends biology. Everything is social and environmental.

In some philosophy I was doing with a student recently we were talking about the idea of idealizing people as if they were "mushroom men" -- people who sprang from the earth as fully formed adults, ready to make decisions, form goals, and negotiate with others for what they need. This was in the context of talking about economics, where sometimes the metaphor is used to explicate models of economic rationality and exchange. But of course it's long been central to philosophy as well, for example in the contractarian and contractualist traditions in historical philosophers like Hobbes and, to a certain extent, in more contemporary ones like Rawls.

Like all idealizations, this one might work better in some contexts and worse in others, it might capture or obscure what we want to see in certain settings, it might be more or less of a misrepresentation depending on what we're using it for.

Still, I found the story a great reminder of how far from that we really are. It's not just that when we're small, we're temporarily unable to forage for food or work at jobs. It's also that everything we do -- even something like eating! -- depends on a fragile and contingent network of things happening and people who love us there to make sure those things work the way they're supposed to.

My Mother Audrey Would Not Just Follow Your Stupid Rules

My mom in her twenties

As regular readers know, my mother had been in ill health for quite a while. Last week I posted that picture of my parents from back in the day. The following day, my mother died.

As you may know if you read the obituary, my mother was a political activist, feminist, cat-lover, and Red Sox fan, known for her open-mindedness, humor, warmth, and compassion. But she was also what you would call an "independent thinker."

People toss around phrases like "independent thinker" to be nice about eccentrics, intellectuals, or weirdos, but my mom was the real deal. She just refused to go along with things just because they were things everyone else was doing, or things someone else wanted her to do, or things you'd be expected to do just because doing them was part of how the system works.

When my mom was just out of high school, she moved out of her parents house, got a job, and got an apartment in Boston with her friends -- something single women never did in the mid-fifties. Though she never went to college, she read widely in a range of subjects and especially in politics and education. She thought elementary school should have more freedom and more play and more unstructured learning -- and she said so to anyone who would listen -- even while my father was running for school committee in our town on almost the opposite platform.

My mom played the piano and was seriously into classical music, but she refused to play in front of people -- she said it drove her crazy if she was playing and people were talking, so she just said, "Nope!" In 1976, when everyone was arguing about Carter versus Ford, my mom campaigned for Senator Gene McCarthy. Her favorite movie was Auntie Mame.

I'm not going to lie: being the child of an independent thinker wasn't always easy. My mom's feminist commitments included the concept that children should be dressed in jeans, t-shirts, and sneakers -- basically, clothes you could run around in. But I was a girly girl from the earliest age. Why couldn't I run around in a dress? My mom valued eduction, and sometimes said she wished she'd gone to college -- but then she also said she only wanted to go if she didn't have to do any assignments she didn't want to do. Why couldn't she just suck it up, like everyone else? When she drove around without car insurance or registration because "nothing bad is going to happen" or wouldn't go to the doctor because she was "mad at the American health care system," I went nuts.

But my mom's habits of independent thought have obviously had a profound impact on who I am as a person. I myself enjoy challenging the status quo. Even though my mom seemed to think academic philosophy was an unimaginative and irrelevant way to think about things, the impulse to ask "why are things way rather than some other way" is one that clearly forms a basic part of my intellectual approach to the world. Also, I don't mind being thought a weirdo. For these things, crucial to who I am, I have my mother to thank.

My mom had a heart condition that caused her to have heart failure last fall, and after a hospital stay she was weakened enough that had to move permanently to a nursing home. In a way, she was OK there: reading, following politics, and watching the Red Sox were all activities easy to continue, and her warmth and caring attitudes were appreciated. But she didn't like the rules. She didn't like being told that she had to do physical therapy, or that she had to take a shower at a certain time. She didn't like that she had an identifying bracelet with her doctor's name written on it. She didn't like being part of the system.

Over the last few weeks my mom's health declined rapidly, likely because of her heart. On one of her last days, the doctor came in to check on her. "Audrey," he said, as he leaned down to speak into her ear. "It's me, Dr. Sharma."

My mother had just been lying there with her eyes closed, but at this she perked up. "Oh!" she said, raising her braceleted wrist, her tone eye-rolly and sarcastic. "I guess I belong to you." Everybody laughed. Complaining about the system, right to the very end. That's my mom!

Guest Post: A Dry Rob Roy

This guest post is by my former co-blogger at Commonwealth and Commonwealth, Captain Colossal

My father’s mother died Thursday night. She was 97 years old, which I find easy to remember because she was born in 1917 and I was born in 1977. She died in her sleep after about two years of mostly waiting to die.

My father and his partner happened to be visiting me at the time. We decided to honor her memory by making dry Rob Roys and cooking beans and greens. The beans and greens were a more straightforward tribute than the Rob Roys. I lived with my grandmother for about three months after college. It was a time when I had no idea what I wanted to do with myself and I took over the cooking because my grandmother’s idea of dinner was a single hot dog on a little plate without a bun.
After the first night I cooked, she said, “Do you think you could make beans and greens?”

I had never heard of beans and greens. This was a number of years ago, so instead of going on the internet I went to the library and checked out the cookbook section. I found a recipe and made beans and greens. When I went to visit her this spring, she told her caretaker that she had taught me to cook, which is true, in a certain sense. My husband reminded me, when we were talking about the beans and greens, that beans and greens were the first thing I ever cooked for him. My grandmother loved being cooked for; she loved being taken care of.

My grandmother also enjoyed drinking. She was not, at least to my knowledge, a rowdy drinker -- she was a quiet drinker. She drank beer in summer, but in winter she said she needed something to warm her up. When I was a child she became very concerned about the American trade imbalance and so she switched from drinking Scotch to drinking rum.

The story with the dry Rob Roys is that there was a time when she was on a long-distance car trip with my father and his partner and they stopped for lunch at some kind of diner-type place. The three of them were on their way to an event and they were running late. They had hours of social engagement ahead of them. The teenage waiter came over to take their order, and my grandmother pursed her lips thoughtfully. I wasn’t there, you understand. This is an imaginative re-creation. “I’d like,” she said, “a dry Rob Roy.”

Do you even know what a Rob Roy is? The teenage waiter didn’t, in any case. In any case, it was a strange time to order a cocktail and a strange place to order a cocktail. Several years later I read a Lydia Davis story in which the narrator’s elderly father requests a Rob Roy under similarly inappropriate circumstances. It gave me a funny feeling about the world, a feeling that the world, rather than being a place of infinite possibility, is more of a Tetris-type situation, where certain pieces will always have to be combined with certain other pieces.

A dry Rob Roy is Scotch, dry vermouth, and Angostura bitters. At least, that’s what the internet and the Joy of Cooking tell me. It is one form of alcohol combined with two other forms of alcohol. I don’t usually drink cocktails, and so I was surprised that all three of the ingredients were alcoholic. The grocery store nearest my house sold all three forms of alcohol, which surprised and pleased me. I didn’t have a single cocktail shaker, although at one time I had two. I got rid of them because I never used them. When I do drink a mixed drink it usually means that I have added some significant quantity of non-alcoholic mixer to the alcohol in my glass. You don’t need a cocktail shaker for that.

We mixed the ingredients in a pint glass. We used crushed ice, which was a mistake, because it started melting almost immediately. When we poured out the dry Rob Roys my father’s partner used a coaster to keep the ice in the pint glass. The recipe said to use two dashes of vermouth and one dash of Angostura bitters per cocktail. I wasn’t sure what a dash multiplied by three looked like.

The dry Rob Roys were very pretty looking, all golden in the glass. We raised our glasses and took a sip. My father made a face. “It’s so sweet,” he said. I didn’t think it was sweet. It burned. My father drank about a third of his. My father’s partner drank hers. “It makes me feel weird,” she said. I drank mine very slowly. Because I drank it so slowly it got warm, which did not make it taste better. It made me feel drunk, not in a fun way, but in a way where the room seemed a little askew. I couldn’t get past the idea that the taste was made by combining different varieties of alcohol.

I could tell you endless stories about my grandmother -- how she kept her belongings beautifully clean and took care of them for decades, how she declined to get a new cat when her last cat died almost fifteen years ago because she thought the cat might outlive her, and that would be unfair to the cat, how she loved being kidded -- she loved it when I or my father, telling her goodbye, would tell her to behave, to stay out of trouble. “I try,” she would say, and she would shake her head a little bit with the difficulty of the task. There are a lot of things I know about her, a lot of things I could tell you, and even more that I couldn’t. I knew her better than I know most people and she remains mostly mysterious to me. The desire for a dry Rob Roy at midday in a roadside diner, with a long day ahead, is only one of those mysteries.

The Good Things, They Do Not Always Fit Together

Lia Lee

Recently, Lia Lee died.  In her youth, Lia was a child with severe epilepsy in a family of Hmong refugees, who clashed with the medical professionals assigned to her care.  Her case spawned the book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures.

At 4, Lia had a grand-mal seizure, got an infection, and went into septic shock.  She lost all higher brain function.  She lived the rest of her life -- she died at age 30 -- unable to speak or move around or do much of anything, really.

When I read the notice of Lia's death in The Times, I thought to myself, "Wow, I have to read that book."  The book is, in fact, truly brilliant.  The author, Anne Fadiman, spent a huge amount of time getting to know the Lees and becoming their friend and also getting to know the doctors and reading Lia's vast transcribed medical history and so on. 

The story is heartbreaking along several dimensions, the most obvious of which has to do with the early failed efforts to bring Lia's epilepsy under control.  The doctors wrote out prescriptions and gave complex orders, inattentive to the fact that the cultural communication problems went way beyond the translation of words. 

The drugs sometimes seemed to make Lia worse in the short run.  The family not only couldn't read or use a thermometer or anything, they had no experience with Western style medicine at all.  They had their own way of dealing with epilepsy -- the disease whose name in Hmong means something like "the spirit catches you and you fall down."  In their minds, epilepsy was a mixed thing:  bad, because dangerous, but also in some ways good, because you were in touch with the spiritual realm and could, yourself, become a healer.  They didn't always give Lia the drugs. 

The result:  Lia often didn't get what the doctors were prescribing, and relations between the parents and the medical team predictably deteriorated.  When you look at it from the Lee's point of view, it's terrifying the way the doctors have the power of the state behind them to force the family into doing whatever they said.  At one point, even though Lia's parents are about the most loving and attentive parents you can possibly imagine, Lia was forcibly taken from their home and placed in foster care.  On the other hand, when you look at it from the doctors' point of view, Lia deserved the best medical care possible; her parents wishes aren't the only thing that matters.  It is a difficult situation. 

In later years, there was a rapprochement between Lia's mother Foua and her early doctors.  Here is Foua together with Dr. Peggy Philp, at a panel discussion of Fadiman's book in 2002.

One of the themes of the book and the Times notice is the way the Lee family dealt with having Lia in their lives.  She not only lived at home her whole life, she was the center of family life.  Later Fadiman said, "She was never shunted to the periphery ... I remember her most in her mother’s arms. Family life went on around her and in some ways revolved around her."

Lia's parents -- and especially her mother -- never left her side.  They fed her, and bathed her, and talked to her, and listened to her, and watched her, and soothed her skin, and moved her limbs.  Most people in Lia's mental condition live 3 to 5 years.  Lia lived for 26 years.  When the doctors sent Lia home, they told the family that she'd be dead within the week.  Boy did they prove that wrong.

The Times says of this, "The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down is also the story of the immense benefits of tradition, which can furnish, Ms. Fadiman makes clear, a level of familial devotion less often seen among modern Americans."

Which really got me thinking about Lia's parents and their way of life, and especially about Lia's mom, who had virtually no outside life.  In the book it's not presented as a sacrifice.  According to Fadiman, in Hmong culture it's common to marry young and have lots of children, and life often revolves happily around their care.

And first I thought, "Wow, I am really immersed in the Modern/Western/Cosmopolitan/Whatever way of life."  I mean, on some level I always know that I'm immersed in that way of life.  But it's the kind of thing you don't always stop and think about. 

Because I found the idea of living the way Lia's parents lived almost unbearable to contemplate.  I mean, if you think of one day, it might seem nice:  you wake up, you attend to the children, you play with Lia for a while, you feed everybody lunch, etc etc etc. and sometimes family and friends come by.  But every day?  No going out to the coffee shop, no cocktails, no going to work even?  Wow.


And for all that Lia's familial care is a beautiful and moving thing, I think it's important not to lose sight of the fact that the things in our society that make it impossible, or at least extremely difficult, for most of us to imagine living this way -- those are great things in their own way, too. 

For instance, I'm addicted to getting out and seeing the faces of people I don't know, to doing things that connect me to people beyond my family and friends, to being part of a large world.  And I think of those as basically good qualities to have:  they're part of feeling like a member of the human race, loving diversity and difference, and enjoying the fact that people live in all kinds of different ways.

I'm the first to admit that this way of life we have here -- it really does make us less able to care for the Lias of the world -- I mean, people like Lia as she was after her traumatic brain injury at age 4.  If you're unwell, there really is no replacement for having someone who loves you tend to your needs 24 hours a day.   

To me the moral of that story is just that you can't have all the good things in life all at the same time.  Yes, complete immersion in family life and care for others can be wonderful.  Yes, the world we live in makes this immersion almost impossible for many people.  But that doesn't mean there's something bad about our way of life.  It just means there can be wonderful things that do not all fit together.

There's a contingent out there, I think, that wants to deny this -- perhaps because it can seem like a dark, daunting, or depressing idea.  That contingent tells us:  you can have all the good things.  It just takes compromise.  A little work, a little taking care of Lia, you're good to go.  Then the moral would be: we modern western cosmopolitans need to change, not be so extreme. 


I have no doubt that compromise among good things can be a good way to live.  But it doesn't remove the conceptual problem.  The whole point about Lia's parents is that they weren't just there for her from 5 to 10 pm.  They were there for her 24 hours a day.  I live, to some extent, on the other extreme.  Even making healthy dinners and brushing my own teeth feel like endless chores.  Again?  But I just made dinner yesterday!

If I'm right that the good things in life don't fit together, that compromise doesn't solve the conceptual problems, that shows that living in the extremes can all be good ways to live.  It can be wonderful to be there for Lia for 26 years of breakfasts and bathing and the moving of the limbs.  It can also be wonderful to be the cosmopolitan who needs the faces of strangers, a day of work outside the home every day, a fast internet connection, and cocktails promptly at seven.

Sure, if you live a monochromatic life, you're missing something.  But my idea is that however you set it up, you're missing something.  So if you want to live monochromatically, knock yourself out.

Life On Earth Interim Report: Earth In Trouble. Please Send Mothers.

Yesterday on Naked Capitalism (the blog everyone should read), the great Yves Smith mentioned a funny comment she'd seen on a YouTube video about flying robots:  in the future, there will only be two workers, a human and a dog.  The human's job will be feeding the dog.  The dog's job will be making sure the human doesn't touch the computers. 

As was explained to me later, the mental picture this is supposed to conjure up is that the computers, having taken charge, use the dog to make sure the humans don't screw around with their hardware.  That's why it's funny, and that's why it makes a point, a warning, about the future. 

But what had come into my mind was different.  I pictured the human being kept away from the computers for his own good, like the way a dog might keep an alcoholic away from booze.  My interpretation makes no sense.  Who would be paying the workers? How would the human's job be a job at all?  I think what happened is I heard "dog's job will be making sure the human doesn't touch the computers" and I thought "huh, yeah, I could use a helpmate that makes sure I don't touch the computers -- or that makes sure I touch them less, anyway.  And I pictured having a dog to help me out, and that seemed kind of charming and nice so I went with it.

When things like this happen I often feel like an extraterrestrial, sent to visit earth, who didn't quite get transmorgrified correctly.  I mean, I got made into a human, but there were a few glitches.  I was left with a few qualities more suited to the home planet. 

There's definitely a "loud noises" glitch.  I don't think my handlers realized life on earth was going to be so noisy.  Maybe they had dated information?  But seriously, I can't even visit a modern restroom, with those new hand dryers, without prepping myself with special insertable earphones that block the sound.  If I don't have them in I'm like "FUCK that's so FUCKING LOUD, what the FUCK is that noise get me the FUCK out of here now" and I put my fingers in my ears and scurry out.  Then I look around at the other patrons and they're all "ho-hum just drying my hands ... [dawdle dawdle]" acting all nonchalant and looking at me like I'm a freak.  And I'm like "Who are you people?" 

Then, too, I frequently feel like I am too good at reading and experiencing the thoughts and moods of other people.  I wrote about this before, where I called it alloism.  Sometimes I'm hanging out in a group and I'm thinking OMG did you see how X dissed Y by saying something that was nice on the surface but undermining underneath and how Y got all mad, and I'll describe all this to Z who was there with me, all of us together, and Z will be all "Wait, what? What happened?  Did somebody get mad?"

Anyway, I think I was given quite a bit of information about life on earth before I came, because I've always been one of those people that does pretty well at predicting how other people are going to behave and feel, at taking the long view, and all that sort of thing.  I have almost the same beliefs about people I had when I was around five.

But a few things have really surprised me.  And I would say that the thing that has surprised me most is how susceptible most people are to other people.  They are so much more influenced by other people than they ever are by things like rules, punishments, and incentives.

When I was a kid I had a really naive view that people had things they really wanted to do, and they were going to do those things, unless it became too costly for them to do them.  Like, if they wanted to blow off school, steal lipstick, be mean to another kid, or whatever, they would, unless they didn't want the punishment or the loss of some privilege. 

It turns out that that is almost completely wrong.  People don't have the clarity of desire I attributed to them, like "Now, I want to steal lipstick."  Often they don't even know why they're doing what they're doing.  They do one thing aiming to achieve another, or they do stuff just to get some attention, or they're bored, or who even knows? 

Plus, they're often much more influenced by other people's words and expressions of anger and praise than they are by punishments and incentives.  I first came to see this vividly when I started teaching.  I teach university students.  I thought, "They're adults.  They don't need me mothering and nagging them.  I'll just set up an appropriate and fair system of punishments and rewards for doing things like homework and reading and so on, and they can decide what they want to do.  If the incentive isn't worth it to them, that's their business.  If they don't do the work, I'm not going to take it personally, for heavens sake."

Turns out that taking it personally -- well, at least, somehow getting kind of emotionally in people's faces -- is way more effective at getting them to do things than abstract rewards and punishments at the end of the term.  This doesn't always come naturally to me -- I mean, how could I take it personally whether somebody does the reading?  But I do care about my students becoming literate and smart instead of ignorant and stupid, and I try to show them this, and it has more of an effect than simple incentives.

In this great New Yorker article from 2011, Atul Gawande describes a health program that tries to cut costs by taking extra, better care of very ill and very costly patients.  These patients often have conditions like diabetes, that respond well to constant vigilance and good habits, but can kill you if you don't take care of yourself.  In some cases, sickness and the possibility of death failed to motivate people to develop healthier habits, but visits from a kind and interested person, who basically nagged and encouraged them, worked. 

The guy who set up the program, Jeffrey Brenner, is quoted in the article as saying "People are people, and they get into situations they don’t necessarily plan on. My philosophy about primary care is that the only person who has changed anyone's life is their mother. The reason is that she cares about them, and she says the same simple thing over and over and over."

I've said it before:  the mom virtues:  not just for women anymore.  The philosophical locus classicus for the need for mothering is good old Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley (Ms. Interesting).  If you've read that book recently, you know that that even though the whole "science and technology" and "playing god" and "monster" themes were very important, it's made clear throughout the book that what really changes the creature from a kindly awkward person into a violent monster is that his creator hates him.  He has no mother.  This ruins the lives of everyone in the story.

So here in the 21st century, where we all have a lot of bad health habits and ecological habits and violence habits and intellectual laziness habits, we could all use a little more mothering.  Needless to say, mothering need not be done by your actual mother, who may be busy working and doing stuff.  If you're a grown-up, you don't need an actual mother, you just need a lot of people in your life who'll care and who'll tell you the same simple thing over and over.  Eat your vegetables.  Play nice.  Tell the truth.  Go to the gym. 

I don't know when my visit here on earth will end or how my information is getting transmitted back.  But hey -- home planet, if you're listening, I have an interim report:

"Earth in trouble.  Please send mothers."

Modernity Boot Camp, Or, When One Lives Among Madmen, One Should Train As A Maniac

Over the weekend I went to see a classic Bollywood movie:  Kal Aaj Aur Kal (Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow) from 1971.  It tells the tale of a family, a grandfather, father, and son  -- played by a real life grandfather, father, and son from the famous Kapoor family -- in which the son and the grandfather clash generationally, and the father is caught unhappily in the middle. 

Among other things, it's a movie about modernity.  The son and grandfather fight over food, clothing, music, parties, religion, the caste system, individuality, tradition, sex, love, and marriage.  Are these or are these not the flashpoints of modernity the world over?

In the central battle of wills, the grandfather insists that the son marry the pious daughter of his friend from the village.  The son wants to marry the elegant and super-modern Monica, whom he met, of course, on an airplane.  Here's the young couple getting to know each other:

Cute, huh?  The sixties were so much the sixties the world over.

Anyway, although she's modern, Monica is a good girl.  She comes from a respected family; she gets yelled at by her mom for not being ready for dinner on time; she's shocked when a mutual friend turns up pregnant by her fiance.  The grandfather's only substantive complaint seems to be that she doesn't know how to cook.  So this isn't so much a movie about marrying outside your cultural circle as a movie about marrying a woman you chose yourself.

For most of the movie, I assumed this conflict would resolve itself through mutual recognition of Monica's essential status as a good girl.  There's a touching scene where Monica serves the grandfather some food, and I thought "Oh, surely he'll see now that even though she's not his choice, she's a good girl, and he'll relent and let the grandson marry her."

And that, I figured, would be the lesson about modernity:  that underneath it all, the things we value aren't all that different. 

But no.  I'm not going to spoil the ending for you, but instead of commonsense and compromise, there is drama, self-sacrifice, and secret plotting.  If there's a lesson about modernity in this movie, it's not underneath it all we're much the same but rather modernity:  it's a fight to the death.

And the more I thought about that the more it grew on me.  Individuality and choosing for yourself -- they're just not the kind of thing about which there are compromises.  Either you choose for yourself or you don't.  And we've gotten into a habit of -- of kind of sugarcoating the difference.  Of treating modernity like a kind of increase in common sense rather than a radical experiment in human life. 

Because promising and lovable as it is -- and let's be clear, no one loves modernity more than I -- modernity creates conditions that are destabilizing, dangerous, and wildly unpredictable. 

The idea that we should make decisions for ourselves, in the absence of bowing to tradition, it's an extreme idea for beings like us -- beings that are impulsive, emotional, and fragile.  Think about how dependent we are.  We're easily carried away.  We crave happiness and warmth.  We're so physically delicate we need food and water every few hours.

And now you plonk us down, rudderless, in the middle of consumer culture and expect us to thrive?  We're supposed to figure out how to fight temptation and laziness all day every day?  To walk calmly past a million displays of baked goods, candy, cigarettes, and just say no?  To delete the spam that offers better bods, better sex, instant cash?  To decide how to save for retirement, to select a mortgage, to pick insurance packages?  To decide to go to the gym, day after day, after eight hours at work?

Not easy. 

Given how hard it is, you'd think that there would be some training program for modernity.  Like a modernity boot camp.  They'd teach you how to have massive self-directedness, endless self-control, and an imperviousness to small sufferings.  Maybe you remember this post on ego depletion?  Well modernity boot camp would give you huge muscles of willpower alongside your huge pecs and six-pack abs. 

When I was young I had a daydream of modernity boot camp, and I thought I might satisfy it by joining the actual real life military.  You know, toughness, discipline, getting it together.  That didn't work out for me because of the whole having-to-kill-people aspect, which was a deal-breaker.

Weirdly, not only don't we have modernity boot camp, it's almost like we have anti-training for modernity.  Young people are more left to their own devices than ever; the crime of being "late to dinner" has been erased in a world of sports practice and music lessons; and it's become elitist to go around saying you don't watch Mad Men or whatever because you were busy reading a book.

I don't know what form modernity boot camp should take, exactly, but perhaps we can take as a starting point for reflection the real life story of the actress who played Monica in the movie -- Babita Kapoor.  She and the actor who played the son really did get married in real life.  And what do you think happened next?  Her new family told her she had to quit acting, because women in their family weren't supposed to act. 

I don't know how exactly how Babita Kapoor responded to this, but whatever she did was effective, because her two daughters have become highly successful actresses and stars of Bollywood.  So as far as I'm concerned, Ms. Kapoor can be first headmistress of our new training school.

And for a school motto, we can't do better than to follow the Count of Monte Cristo, who said,

when one lives among madmen, one should train as a maniac.  

Being Versus Doing: A Plea For Being

A Dandy, by Georges Jacques Gatine (1773-1831), a painting by Carle Vernet [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

I was the kind of little kid who dreamed of becoming Miss America, or a fashion model, or at least a cheerleader.  My hero in life was Cher.  I dreamed of halter tops, hot pants, and crazy shoes.  I can't remember a time when I wasn't thinking about high heels.

When I was young my feminist mom taught me a few things about those particular dreams (thanks, Mom!).  She pointed out that girls are taught to want to be things -- pretty, fashionable, pleasing -- whereas guys are taught to want to do things.  The message was clear:  you too should want to do things.

Of course, I already did want to do things.  I was also the kind of little kid who liked to do puzzles and make stuff, a nerd who was into math, and music, and school, and all that.  Focusing on the Doing rather than the Being came naturally. 

The advice was, of course, excellent.  But why was it excellent?

It's sometimes thought that this kind of advice is good because Doing is somehow better than Being.  But I've come to think the whole Being versus Doing thing is not so clear cut.  Because Being is pretty great.  And Doing -- it's maybe a little overrated.  Here in the Last Days of Western Civilization, we've become so Doing Doing Doing.  It's wearing me out.  What about Being?

What is it about fashion and beauty that make them seem like Being rather than Doing?  I take it the answer is something like:  they're Being because even though they are activities, they are activities that are focused on the responses of others.  Doing is supposed to be somehow independent of those responses.  You invent something, you play your best, you climb some stupid mountain, and those things are supposed to matter regardless of whether you look good doing them and regardless if anyone cares.  And that kind of Doing is supposed to be better. 

If you put the distinction that way, though, you get this question:  what about art? 

Art is thought of as Doing.  But it's not independent of the responses of others.  It's all about the responses of others.  If you're trying to become a great painter or a great dancer or a great musician, you're trying to do something to which other people will respond to in a certain way. 

But that would make art less of a Doing than other activities, and if Doing is better, would make art less worthwhile than those other activities.  But surely art is as -- or more -- worthwhile than Doings like sports and hiking?

I think the answer is that Doing isn't really better than Being, because they're both good.  Of course people want others to respond to them in certain ways:  what could be more human?  A good life will have both kinds of activities -- those centered on the responses of others and those centered on the responses of one's self.

One reason we've gotten so screwed up about this is that sex and gender identities, especially historically, pressure women toward More Being and Less Doing.  And because we humans are kind of crude in our application of concepts, this means they also pressure men to become More Doing and Less Being.  This would explain the absurd connection in modern North American between masculinity and anti-art-ism.

So we've got an imbalance.  To right the imbalance, women should remember the importance of Doing and not give in the pressures for Being.  Feminism correctly reminds us of this, and that's why my mother's advice was good.  But this has nothing to do with Being being somehow inherently less good than Doing.

It follows from this that men should remember the importance of Being and not give into the pressures for Doing.  Norms of modern masculinity sanction a few limited forms of Being, like owning a fancy car.  But the range is pretty impoverished, and the cultural pressures from the gender police are crazy.  A guy can't even shop for a nice shirt these days without people getting all wound up about it. 

If men could enjoy fashion, beauty, and being pleasing to others, like the dandy in the painting above, we'd all be better off.

Mary Shelley Was Ms. Interesting

Mary Shelley

I was reading a book by the philosopher Peter Singer and he mentioned a nineteenth-century guy named Godwin who proposed a crazy thought experiment in which you are outside a burning building and inside is a famous author and also your father who is the author's valet and you have to decide whether to save the author or your father and Godwin said you should save the author because morality requires impartiality and impartially the author will bring a greater amount of happiness and well-being to the world than your father ever would.

I went home and I looked up Mister Godwin and I found out that he was the husband of feminist pioneer Mary Wollstonecraft and the father of Mary Shelley author of Frankenstein one of the most philosophical novels ever written (IMHO) and a book I've always taken to be profoundly critical of the impartial worldview and I also learned that not only did Mary run away with Percy Shelley when she was seventeen and he was married and write Frankenstein when she was twenty she also wrote other novels including one about father-daughter incest which she sent to her father Mister Godwin and he never sent it back despite her begging and pleading because he thought it was disgusting and it never was published 'til after he died.

Also she had a "non-exclusive" marriage with Percy and a miscarriage and two children who died young and then finally another son who lived and as we all know her husband died young but Mary lived long and unlike all the "Mr. Interestings" out there she spent a huge amount of her time taking care of her son and making money for his school fees and moving to Harrow on the Hill (don't ask me) so that her son could attend Harrow without paying boarding fees and later she lived with her son and traveled with him and his wife and meanwhile she wrote a bunch of books and stories and political stuff and edited some of her late husband's work.

You can read all about it on Wikipedia here.

 We love you, Ms. Shelley.

The One-Sex Solution, Or, What If Men Could Get Pregnant?

This statue is called Sleeping Hermaphroditus, it's a Roman copy of a Greek original.  Pretty, isn't it?

I've always thought that human life would be substantially improved if there was only one sex instead of two.  I don't mean doing away with the whole sex concept.  Au contraire.  I mean every person would have the full sexual equipment of both women and men.  As for pregnancy, you could mix and match it however you wanted:  in a partnership of A and B, A could be the pregnant one or B could.

Think of the advantages.  No gender inequality.  No books like that "Men are from Mars" book.  Shared magazine racks.  Total non-mystery about how the genitals of other people work.  With a full set of your own, you'd know just what was going on with everyone else.

One of the huge advantages, I think, would be the way things would change if everyone could get pregnant.  Because even just being in a state of being possible to impregnate -- a state most women live in for most of their lives -- gives you a particular way of relating to the world. 

For one thing, think for a second of the enormous trust women place in the social contract and in men.  Forget bars and late evenings:  every time we go out of the house we trust men not to rape us and get us pregnant against our wishes.  And sure, you might say, if you're raped you could have an abortion.  Sure, but obviously:  not everyone can, not everyone wants to, and jeez, that is not something that is a walk in the park under any circumstances.  And yes, there are laws against rape.  But not every guy is going to get caught, and not every guy is even going to care. 

To some extent, of course, there are parallels with men.  A man does trust other people not to assault and kill him.  But I think these only go so far.  A person has to be pretty dead set on mayhem to kill another -- it's always astonishing to me, actually, how often men who are brawling and fighting will defer to norms of "fair play" and fail to just annihilate each other.  Rape is so much less risky.  A guy can always say it was consensual.  And let's face it, it's way easier to rape someone than to kill them.  Unlike assault that doesn't end in death or dismemberment, rape can cause your entire life to change unalterably.  You may now be carrying, inside you, a small dependent proto-person who is actually related to your rapist. 

So right off the bat, I feel this colors how I relate to the world.  For my life to make sense I have to live in a community that is based on mutual trust and reciprocal respect.  Mutual threat containment isn't really going to be enough.  The actual social relations between people matter a huge amount. 

Then, too, in the case where you want to get pregnant, think of how immediately and closely you have to depend on other people in the early infant stages of the process.  Imagine trying to feed yourself, all alone, while taking care of a small infant.  I don't mean going to the ATM -- I mean if you were truly alone and not in a society.  Virtually impossible.  You're going to have to depend on people to help you out.

What these things have in common is a kind of vulnerability and interdependence.  They make me feel like being somewhat vulnerable to others and interdependent on them is a natural state of things, and not some pathological state that has to be negotiated and escaped from.  And I think this is true in a basic way of people -- it's just that being a woman it's more obvious.

By the way, of course this vulnerability colors how women approach having casual sex.  I'm always amazed at the way people assume that because women are more leery of casual sex, they must not want it as much as men.  Maybe they do and maybe they don't -- but you're not going to read that off from their behavior at bars.  Because for every act of casual sex women have, they go home with the possibility of a new proto-person growing inside them.  It's a substantial risk to take with a person you hardly know. 

Actually, I've always been a little surprised at how little the possibility of a proto-person seems to concern the average guy.  Because sure, the woman carries it, but assuming she carries it to term, you too could be parent to a new infant.  A lof of guys seem never to think about this or don't care.  Given the laws on child support this is really puzzling.

Anyway, the one-sex solution would solve all these difficulties, too, and make it all equalized.  Everyone would be a possible pregnant person, and everyone would be a possible mom.  It's a win-win situation.  Just think how we'd all get along!

The Mom Virtues: Not Just For Women Anymore

There was a great Roz Chast cartoon in the New Yorker a few weeks ago captioned "Mothers Without Borders." It showed a range of moms saying things like "Lack of infrastructure is no excuse for such language," and "If so-and-so jumped off a bridge, would you?"

I don't have kids of my own, but I had an immediate feeling of identification with this cartoon. Because really, most grown-up women are moms in some sense. I mean, if you're out and about and you cut your finger, and you need a bandaid, or you get thirsty and you need something to drink, or you get a tear in your pants and need a safety pin, odds are there's a woman around you're going to ask to help you out. It's not a 100 percent sort of thing but it's a thing.

I've been surprised to find myself becoming more and more mom-like as I get older. I've always been conceptually comitted to not nagging people, but as I get older and wiser, it's hard to refrain from trying to nudge the people I love toward more sensible behavior -- or at least, toward behavior I'm pretty sure is going to be better for them in the long run. "Eat your vegetables!" "Have you been going to the gym?" "Don't forget to make your travel plans early!" "Have you considered turning off the TV and reading a good book?"

As I see it, the omnipresence of moms is a basiscally a good thing. If you listen, you benefit, and if you want to ignore, well, at least you can set yourself up as a rebel without having to take anything to extremes.

The mom virtues don't just include worrying, though. They also include comfort and hospitality. There's an incredibly moving scene in one of Trollope's Palliser books describing an intense meeting between a man and a woman. They haven't seen each other in a long time; they used to love one another; at the time of the meeting she is living in desperately unhappy circumstances. The man travels far to reach her, in wintery cold, on a night train, and the first thing she does is tend to his comforts: she makes tea; she gets some food ready; she makes the fire warm. Trollope observes that no matter how complex the relationships are and no matter how important the meeting, a man who has traveled through the cold and is hungry needs to have his comforts seen to. And you know, it's true. Of all of us.

I think of these virtues as the mom virtues, but lots of men have them, and if you know one of them, you know how excellent a thing it is to be looked after in life. Now that more women are busy working and so on, we need more men with the mom virtues. You don't have to call them that -- maybe someone can think up a snappier and less feminine-sounding name. But yeah everyone, take Roz Chast as your model. Mothers without borders. Play nice together! Clean up your toys! Don't eat all the candy! OK?