Andrew Sullivan’s short and potent The Madness of King Donald levels-up when it ends with a subject rather more profound than our current administration:
I’ve managed to see Scorsese’s Silence twice in the last
couple of weeks. It literally silenced me. It’s a
surpassingly beautiful movie — but its genius lies in the
complexity of its understanding of what faith really is.
For some secular liberals, faith is some kind of easy,
simple abdication of reason — a liberation from reality.
For Scorsese, it’s a riddle wrapped in a mystery, and
often inseparable from crippling, perpetual doubt. You
see this in the main protagonist’s evolution: from a
certain, absolutist arrogance to a long sacrifice of
pride toward a deeper spiritual truth. Faith is a result,
in the end, of living, of seeing your previous
certainties crumble and be rebuilt, shakily, on new
grounds. God is almost always silent, hidden, and
sometimes most painfully so in the face of hideous
injustice or suffering. A life of faith is therefore not
real unless it is riddled with despair.
How efficiently he gets from his summary of secular liberals’ imperfect understanding to the realities of a life of faith. As a secular liberal guilty of precisely that imperfect understanding, reading this helped me understand that faith doesn’t resolve all existential angst or salve all philosophical bramble.
The originators and adherents of #GiveYourMoneyToWomen
didn’t just suggest that women should get paid for
existing, although yeah that too if you’re buying.
Rather, women should get paid for all the work they
typically do for free – all the affirmation, forbearance,
consultation, pacifying, guidance, tutorial, and
weathering abuse that we spend energy on every single
day. Imagine a menu of emotional labor: Acknowledge your
thirsty posturing, $50. Pretend to find you fascinating,
$100. Soothe your ego so you don’t get angry, $150. Smile
hollowly while you make a worse version of their joke,
$200. Explain 101-level feminism to you like you’re five
years old, $300. Listen to your rant about “bitches,”
$infinity.
It was beautiful to watch #GiveYourMoneyToWomen
unfold. Men got angry, and then
women explained to them that to have their anger
acknowledged, they would have to pay. This made them
angrier, of course, but without a donation, who was
listening?
Following EverydaySexism has helped me begin to see the grinding, humiliating, oppressive, equality-crushing mill of our society; one that produces suffering women endure knowingly and unknowingly. Reading pieces like Zimmerman’s are my next step in jumping from seeing to understanding. That way lies empathy.
Here’s a nice excerpt from Walking, by Henry David Thoreau:
My desire for knowledge is intermittent, but my desire to
bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is
perennial and constant. The highest that we can attain to
is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence. I do
not know that this higher knowledge amounts to anything
more definite than a novel and grand surprise on a sudden
revelation of the insufficiency of all that we called
Knowledge before—a discovery that there are more things
in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our
philosophy. It is the lighting up of the mist by the sun.
Man cannot KNOW in any higher sense than this, any more
than he can look serenely and with impunity in the face
of the sun: “You will not perceive that, as perceiving a
particular thing,” say the Chaldean Oracles.
At first reading, it may seem to be an argument against Knowing anything but Thoreau declares “insufficiency” of knowledge in the philosophical, not the scientific sense. So, I feel that I can staunchly defend the merits of Science and Knowledge with a video like Science in America from Neil deGrasse Tyson, while nodding along with Thoreau about the importance of imaginatively underestimating how little we understand. That is to say: science is splendidly suited to uncovering truths (statistical significance), completing tasks (move this to there), advancing understanding (how are life and matter shaped), and setting the course of humanity (how should we behave to make sure our descendants don’t die). But if our hubris makes us believe the narrowness of our experimentation accounts for the broadness of the unknown, then we’re just punching buttons on a treadmill. For it is always the imaginative leap of the hypothetical that takes theory, instrumentation, experimentation from one plateau to the next.
Then I would say: science not governed by imagination, but alloyed with it.
It turns out that if you play the 1999 hit song “Say My Name” by Destiny’s Child to Ess while driving in the car, she’ll listen to it, and then ask you to play “Fooba Nane” again please. Then she’ll listen to it a few times in a row, and when the chorus says “Say ‘baby I love you’” she’ll go “no I LOVEYOU, Mama!” and it’ll become part of driving.
But then, in the dark, when Ess is falling asleep in her crib, just before Mykala is going to close the door for the night, Ess will ask her to “sing Fooba Nane.” And Mykala will oblige. And then, over the months, it will become a staple of Essie’s bedtime routine.
Mykala will be asked to change the lyrics to incorporate penguins brushing their teeth (with mama-dada toothpaste), exceptionally high-pitched bird chirping sounds, turtles, dogs, and cats — all singing their own lyrics to the original tune.
And that brings us to today. I look forward to hearing Mykala’s songs each night. I hope this phase lasts for a while.
I thought it might be fun to occasionally write down which library books we’ve checked out and are reading to Ess. This is the current stack on our nightstand:
Ess went through a big “Pete the Cat” phase; now that she has those two books just about memorized, she is moving on to other things. (That’s good, because we have to return these books to the library soon.) There’s a call and response in those two Pete the Cat books:
“Does Pete worry?”
“Goodness, no!”
And as long as she’s not distracted putting a stuffed animal to sleep, or wrapping one monkey’s arms around another so they can be hugged all night, Ess will pipe up: “Goodness, no!”
It’s easy to breeze through the times when Ess is happy, to let her play on her own when she’s content. There are always adult things to be done: cleaning, bill-paying, paperwork, planning, reading pieces on politics, philosophy, coding… and I have noticed I tend to conflate the important tasks with the urgent tasks. I can usually complete the urgent ones while Ess plays, but with that momentum I find I am sailing into important things and then… not very important things.
There’s a speed bump before the fork in the road, but if I can maneuver to the alternate route, I end up in a mindset where I’m thinking about trying to participate with Ess. It isn’t obvious in the moment, but stepping back I realize the bill-paying and cleaning will be there long after Ess grows up. So the three of us have played Zingo (though at this age it devolves into Ess doing “let’s pitch all the pieces around”) and we read of course, but I’ve recently found something worth practicing. I was helping to get Ess out of the car the other day, and instead of thinking about getting her inside, so she could have a bath and get ready for bed, I tried to short-circuit my adult tasklist. I just stopped. And I looked at what Ess was doing. I mean, we are always looking at what Ess is doing (and Mykala is frequently cleaning up after what Ess was doing during the long days while I am at work), but this time I really tried to see.
Perhaps sensing this, Ess immediately began chattering away, narrating what she was imagining, what the two little play bugs she had were doing, going in and out of their house, where were they cold, where were they warm, can I hold this one, see how this one is clean and this one is dirty, and look how the antennae on this one are gone. (I’ve added a picture of what they look like when they’re new.)
Essie’s imagination, the world she’s in, has a richness that surpasses my own. Almost everything is new, and everything is interesting. Her excitement is contagious, her narration frequently hilarious, and her desire to share it all is easy for me, stumbling through the smokescreens of adulthood, to miss.
In her introduction, Romm, who is in her early forties,
writes about her sense, as a young woman, that “striving
and achieving had to be approached delicately or you
risked the negative judgment of others.” She felt a pull
between the hardness of her ambition and the softness of
her socialization, and calls this “the double bind of the
gender, success paired eternally with scrutiny and
retreat.”
And Elisa Albert’s essay in it sounds like the best one:
Maybe my great ambition, such as it is, is to refrain from
engagement with systems that purport to tell me what I’m
worth compared to anyone else.
