real choices: stop before you shop

20 hour workdays. regular beatings. child labour. indentured servitude. rape.

Details
The children are forced to work 12-14 hours a day, with some shifts going 20-hours. In all of September, these child laborers got just one day off. For the grueling long shifts, they are allowed only about four hours of sleep on the factory floor before being awakened and put back on the machines, sometimes collapsing from exhaustion. Their wages are as low as six cents an hour. They are routinely slapped or beaten if they don't meet their production goals, make mistakes, or even take too long in the bathroom. - "At the Western garment factory, which made fleece jackets for Walmart, there were 14 or 15-year-old kids working 18 or 20 hour shifts," he said. "They worked from 8:00 in the morning until midnight or until 4:00 a.m. And they did this seven days a week. They did not get paid for first four months of 2006, they did not receive one cent in wages. They were working as slave labor. When they passed out they were struck by rulers to wake them up. There were four girls who were raped by management." - "You're supposed to say that this factory is closed on Fridays and that no one works here at night. If anyone tells the buyer otherwise, then the company will fire them.” - He admits factory workers sometimes do have to put in extra long hours, for instance when deadlines are looming and fabric deliveries are late. They have little choice, he says, meet the deadline or American companies could take their business elsewhere. - "We used to start at 8 in the morning, and we'd work until midnight, 1 or 2 a.m., seven days a week. When we were in Bangladesh they promised us we would receive $120 a month, but in the five months I was there I only got one month's salary and that was just $50." - Hazrat Ali, 25, who worked from September 2004 to March 2005 at the Al Shahaed factory, said he sometimes worked 48 hours in a row and received no pay for the six months. - "If we asked for money, they hit us," he said.

Culprits
Sears. Walmart. Kohl's. Fila. Victoria's Secret. Express. Ralph Lauren. DKNY. Calvin Klein. Banana Republic. The list goes on.

Hope?
This is the garment industry and how most of your clothing is made. I'm not one for sensational accounts, but the injustices involved in making our clothing has angered me a great deal.

When we buy without questioning from stores that outsource to sweatshops, we are participating in these injustices. The ignorance and complacency of the elite (because by the fact that we have computers and are literate, are the elite), is causing the suffering of the masses.

Plenty argue that sweatshops are a necessary step towards development in third world countries. Or that without these factories, these workers would be worst off. But how much worse can you get than this? These workers' lives could be substantially different with a hardly perceptible impact on cost. I am seriously angry! It's times like these when I can begin to understand why God's anger burns against the violence on the earth. There is no excuse for these abominations. Workers can be paid more without actually cutting into profits. There are better ways to "globalize". American retailers (especially the large ones) need to put more pressure and oversight to ensure good working conditions in sweatshops. And as the end customers to these products, we're in a unique position of power to pressure retailers to action.

A few thoughts:
"If the American retailers paid only 25 cents more per garment, the total in Bangladesh would be $898 million- more than eight times current US aid."
Or as Dov Charney, head of American Apparel, a garment company that pays its workers double minimum wage + benefits, once mentioned: "My labour cost in LA is about 60 cents a T-shirt. In a prison in China it's zero cents. But when you're selling T-shirts for £18, what is 60 cents? It's nothing."

On the bright side, there has been some news of progress, though abuses continue. If anything, this shouldn't excuse us from forgetting about it, but should rather give us more hope that there are huge improvements in this generation that can be made, and that our actions are all the more important. It may not happen overnight, and it may require a long, patient effort, but changes can be made.

Action (please consider it!)
Any or all of these will be of help (You may not do any of it perfectly but it's better to have 10,000 people who are imperfectly committed and vocal than none at all):
1. Don't shop at places that use sweatshop labour. There are a list of reputable retailers at the bottom of this entry that I will eventually add to my sidebar. (On a personal note, Mariya and I have been commiting and trying our best to not buy sweatshop made clothing. If you'd like to join us, in encouraging one another and giving each other ideas about cool places to shop, please post a comment or email me :) ).
2. Spread the word. Raise awareness. Post this on your blog. Write more blog entries.
3. Write letters. Call customer service lines...especially to the larger retailers that have more bargaining power. Get involved with activism groups.
4. Buy Fair Trade or union made clothing. That way you can actually support third world development.
5. If you're a college student or lacking in funds, and can't always afford the slightly higher prices that these stores offer, try Goodwill or the Salvation Army. Great prices, always good finds. And even better: they employ people who were formerly in prison, or are disabled, giving them an opportunity to work and earn money.

Places to shop
American Apparel
Zara (Here's a cnn article on their business model)
Moo Shoes (Vegan and sweatshop free!)
Goodwill
Salvation Army

More articles on the topic
Dateline NBC: Human cost behind bargain shopping
JORDAN: An Ugly Side of Free Trade - Sweatshops
Children Found Sewing Clothing For Wal-Mart, Hanes & Other U.S. & European Companies
A quick overview of different companies and their ethical practices
More articles found here at the National Labor Committee:
http://www.nlcnet.org/news_room.php


*Note: This is not to say that I'm some super ethical shopper. I have my ignorant and complacent moments too. I walk into the store and see something that looks pretty and feels good and I forget about the lives, or the loss of lives that went into the making of that garment. Or, I find myself desperately in need of underwear, and feel like I can't bite the budget to pay more. My attempt to not buy anything made in sweatshops has been recent (the past year), and it's been and still is a process. Though one thing that I have found encouraging, is the longer I do it, the easier it seems to become, and I am looking to get involved with more letter writing/activism.
**Something else to consider, though please don't use it as an excuse for buying from places that use sweatshop labour. (If enough of us do it, then they will have to change. The question is -- will enough of us care enough to change our habits?): "One misconception is that the sweatshop problem can be avoided by not buying from a few major brands. As Hearson notes: 'It's not about the big bad guys any more. Now it's more about moving the entire industry. The difficulties are structural.' Instead of trying to achieve a level of purity in their personal purchases, he argues that consumers need to pressure companies they patronize and large buyers like universities to make more concerted efforts to raise standards--for example by participating in initiatives such as the Ethical Trading Initiative in the UK and the Workers' Rights Consortium in the US. As one important aspect of this, corporations must make a commitment to help employees improve substandard factories, rather than 'cutting and running' when abuses are reported. 'We have to recognize that a company that is doing well on the issue is not necessarily sweatshop-free,' Hearson says. 'It is one that is acknowledging the problem and engaging with worker groups and other stakeholders. If we want improvements across the industry, it's not going to happen overnight.'" from http://www.democracyuprising.com/articles/2006/fair_trade_sweatshops.php

when words lose their meaning (3)*

It's funny how sometimes investment bankers or consultants talk about being afraid of "getting used to their lifestyle" and not being able to change jobs later.

What kind of life is there when you work 80 hours a week?**

*to be continued
**And what does all this work amount to? Some company's stock price may go up by 3/4 of a cent. A lot of rich men might be happy.

when words lose their meaning (2)

The problem with most good things is that they can become so easily perverted.

Books that offer a fount of understanding, enjoyment and knowledge become another form of distracting entertainment. Sleep that restfully strengthens us becomes an activity for withdrawal and escape. (And laughingly in my case, the productive craft of knitting becomes a substitute for self-centered consumption.)

We are so easily turned from agents, individual who choose, to passive recipients, individuals whose lives are controlled by their fears and their environment. Arguably in that case, we are no longer individuals.

“Do not value money for any more nor any less than its worth; it is a good servant but a bad master.”

~ Alexander Dumas

“Books can speak to us like God, like men or like the noise of the city we live in. They speak to us like God when they bring us light and peace and fill us with silence. They speak to us like God when we desire never to leave them. They speak to us like men when we desire to hear them again. They speak to us like the noise of the city when they hold us captive by a weariness that tells us nothing, gives us no peace, and no support, nothing to remember, and yet will not let us escape.

Books that speak like God speak with too much authority to entertain us. Those that speak like good men hold us by their human charm; we grow by finding ourselves in them. They teach us to know ourselves better by recognizing ourselves in another.

Books that speak like the noise of the multitudes reduce us to despair by the sheer weight of their emptiness. They entertain us like the lights of the city streets at night, by hopes they cannot fulfill.”

~ Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude

new york book review (1)*

sometimes, consultants have time to read

My reading has dwindled down this year. With my eyes tired from the glare of the computer screen, my mind either exhausted from debugging computer code, or perhaps numbed from not exercising certain portions of it, and with a sense of confusion and disorientation from constant travel, I often find it hard to focus on a book. Or maybe that’s because I was smart enough to pick books that aren't easy, suspenseful reads (guilty: The Trial by Franz Kafka; Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf). But I have to say, sitting on the plane today, reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day, brought back that delightful joy of narrative. For a while, I was only vaguely aware that I was sitting on a plane, slowly descending over misty rain and dense orange lights scattered across New York City. For a moment, I escaped the repeated experience of a slightly anxious and distracting journey from city to city, through cab rides, security, boarding lines and stowing items into overhead compartments.

All that melodrama being said, here’s the backlog of book reviews since I have started life in the ‘real world’. Also, since I’m no longer required to read, I no longer finish books. Those are italicized. I hope to maybe finish them someday, but it may not happen. Books I actually finished reading are bolded.

Fiction

V for Vendetta by Alan Moore ~ The comic book behind the movie. The comic book is actually quite enjoyable, and I prefer it to the actual movie, because the ending is far more ambiguous and realistic.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera ~ I appreciate Kundera’s poetic reflections on philosophical questions that are posed alongside the story. The narrative itself is decent, but nothing spectacular, concerned with recounting the meaningless lives of people, as though some meaning could be elicited from the act of retelling….

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe ~ This book was enjoyable to read, but didn’t really live up to all my expectations. I think there was a blurb on the back that compared this to Iliad. I’ve never read the Iliad, but I didn’t find such mythic qualities to it. That being said, if my expectations were lower, I would have enjoyed it much more.

White Noise by Don Delillo ~ I really enjoyed this book about a Hitler studies professor and the airborne toxic event. Witty, intelligent and very bleak. Satirizes the academy and today’s consumer society and information overload.

2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke ~ The book that was written alongside the Kubrick film does a much better job of filling in the details that the movie leaves in the dark.

2010: Space Odyssey II by Arthur C. Clarke ~ I really really enjoyed this book. It’s a must-read for any science fiction fan. Beautiful and incredibly surprising ending, as well as some wonderful descriptions of life on one of Jupiter’s moons, on Jupiter etc…

2061: Odyssey Three by Arthur C. Clarke ~ Just as the title might suggest something rather uninventive, the novel is decent, but nothing particularly groundbreaking.

Sophie’s World: A Novel about the History of Philosophy by Jostein Gaarder ~ The plot is cute but expected, though I do remember being really surprised by it when I read it back in high school or middle school. This book took me some two months of Delta Shuttle flights to finish reading, but was a great refresher/explainer of philosophy ideas.

3001: The Final Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke ~ This book contains only about 50 pages of actual continuation of the storyline, the rest seems to be Clarke’s detour into describing the future—one in which the comforts of a technologically-advanced society have stripped humanity of any real meaning in life, except a lengthy enjoyment of simulated pleasures. Nevertheless, his descriptions are absolutely fabulous to read, especially if you’re into descriptions of strange worlds (e.g. The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury). I read this on the plane to California.

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini ~ This doesn’t quite contain the strong cultural and archetype qualities of Things Fall Apart, but it does have a strong, engrossing narrative. I have to admit, sometimes I become a little wary of all this minority literature. That being said, I still think this book is well written, and avoids lengthy ruminations on identity and hybridity. It is instead more about ‘returning to the homeland’ and dealing with the past.

The Trial by Franz Kafka ~ I got through the first 70 pages. This book is rather slow paced. I might try and return to read it again, but for now, I can’t really comment on it.

Great Jones Street by Don Delillo ~ I started reading this book because my boyfriend played a show on Great Jones Street in NY—but I’m stuck about halfway through this book right now. Props though for providing pretty vivid descriptions of Great Jones Street—which now looks nothing like what was described in the book.

Non fiction/Cultural commentary

Comodify your Dissent: Salvos from the Baffler with Thomas frank, Matt Weiland as editors ~ The ideas in this book are nothing mindblowing, but it is an excellent collection of commentary on today’s technological and information society-- in particular the domestication of rebellion and dissent into consumption—written in a style far superior to anything that you could ever produce.

Is there meaning in this text? by Kevin Vanhoozer ~ The first part of this book summarizes the history of intellectual thought on authorship and textual meaning, focusing in particular on the postmodern death of the author and the death of meaning. It’s quite clear and easy to understand. I haven’t gotten yet to the part where Vanhoozer elaborates his own thesis .... so there's not much more that I can say.

Christian (I’m sorry, about 80% of them have stupid titles).

Bringing heaven down to earth: connecting this life to the next by Nathan Bierma ~ Written by a blogger, concerning the Christian’s call to bring heaven down to earth. I read a few chapters here and there, mostly because I was attracted when I heard that Bierma noticed that the Bible begins in a garden and ends in a city. Heaven is urban.

Should I Get Married? by Blaine Smith ~ The book addresses the question of the title by illuminating a few key issues to consider. The first part of this book is excellent—the most important question it asks concerning marriage is “Do you have compassion on the other person?” and “Are you good friends?”. The second part of the book gets weird with these random rules that don’t make any sense, and seem incongruent with the rest of it.

Emotionally Healthy Spirituality by Peter Schazerro ~ Despite the fact that the title and the style of the book hugely smack of that despised genre of ‘Christian self-help’, the book is actually really good. It talks about how spiritual maturity in the way that Christians tend to conceive of it (lots of praying, lots of Bible studies, lots of service etc…) does not always translate into emotional maturity. This book explores daily Biblical devotions and contemplation as a way of learning to live an abundant life as a healthy, whole individual.

The Great Divorce by C.S Lewis ~ I sometimes catch myself wondering if C.S. Lewis’s books will become outdated—that they will only speak strongly to his generation, and some already-converts of mine. Yet rereading the Great Divorce reminds me that there is something timeless about C.S.Lewis’ writing, that hopefully can speak to many, if not, all generations and cultures. His vision of Heaven and Hell give incredible insight into the nature of human suffering and hell.

Love Yourself & Love is a Feeling to be Learned by Walter Trobisch~ Despite a tacky title that would suggest a cheesy new age self-help book, Love Yourself explores the necessity of loving ourselves (something that Christians often avoid… in the name of humility) in order to truly love others. Love is a Feeling to be Learned elaborates that true love is also suffering, not just fluffy pink hearts.

Thoughts in Solitude by Thomas Merton ~ Thomas Merton seems to be another contemplative genius, that is especially applicable to our generation. I’m about halfway through this book, but find that I have to spend a whole day just thinking about what is said in one page. Notably, Merton comments: “When men are merely submerge in a mass of impersonal human beings pushed around by automatic force,s they lose their true humanity, their integrity, their ability to love, their capacity for self-determination. When society is made up of men who know no interior solitude, it can no longer be held together by love: and consequently it is held together by a violent and abusive authority.”

I’ve also made a list of potential reads for the next month or so: Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (it’s an embarrassment that someone who did so much postcolonial literature still has not read this book), American Gods by Neil Gaiman (I have to have my science fiction/fantasy light reads!), Blindness by Jose Saramago (interesting premise….), The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco (I just keep hearing about this book).

*if the guy in High Fidelity can arrange his record collection autobiographically, then I can list my books the same way…

you are what you buy*

Plagued by the mundaneness of our 'New Jersey'/middle class origins, [no, my father did not beat my mother; and no, there were never drive-by shootings in my neighborhood, and no, half my high school class did not get pregnant and drop out of high school], we are driven to consumption in order to compensate for our dull lives and common white collar professions. When we are unable to find satisfaction in our work, we often seek it in the objects and experiences we can buy. We become what we buy.

“The thing about new things is you feel new when you buy them, you feel as though as though you are somebody different because you own something different. We are our possessions, you know.”

~ Blue like Jazz**

We are what we do to the extent that what we do enables us to buy more. Higher paying professions (lawyers, consultants, doctors etc…) give us the income to make respectable purchases of interestingness that being an elementary school teacher does not afford. You’re interesting if you’re a consultant that has traveled the world. You're interesting if you're an investment banker living in a stylish apartment in midtown and are able to go to a different restaurant and nightclub every weekend. You're interesting if you're some top executive and have the money to pick up an extravagant hobby like flying airplanes. But you're definitely not interesting if you’re an elementary school teacher-- unless of course, you work in an inner city neighborhood with Teach for America or some other non-profit, because it’s cool to be 'into poor people'.

*This is one of perhaps a backlog of 15-30 blog entries that are unfinished. I figured, I should just give up, and start posting them….

**On a side note, Intervarsity Press has recently launched a new line of books, called ‘Likewise’, which are sort… of books designed for the postmodern generation. The writing styles are much more similar to Blue like Jazz, edgy, casual, more open for debate and discussion etc… Though I feel there is value in publishing these books, as books contain ideas and ideas ought to be disseminated (:P)-- All the marketing just makes me feel like a niche market. Luckily, our calling is to something much greater than that, whereas everything else in our society would seem to tell me, that is all I am.

when words lose their meaning (1)

Atrocities is such an empty word. Journalists love it. You hear it everyday on the news. You hear it mentioned concerning the events of human history both past and present. The atrocities of Darfur. The atrocities of Rwanda. The atrocities of the Holocaust. And so on and so forth. Does it mean anything any more? Does it mean anything more than a four syllable sound that you hear coming from your plasma screen television, causing you to pause ever so momentarily before you return to eating your dinner?

there are trees and these are splinters

"She preferred not to think about such things"

~ paraphrase from y tu mama tambien

strange the way death potentially unravels the meaning we spend a lifetime trying to make. undone in a moment...

.... Eliot's poetry is not a question of meaning in the first place. The meaning of a poem for Eliot was a fairly trifling matter. It was, he once remarked, like the piece of meat which the burglar throws to the guard dog to keep him occupied. In true symbolist fashion, Eliot was interested in what a poem did, not in what it said—in the resonance of the signifier, the echoes of its archetypes, the ghostly associations haunting its grains and textures, the stealthy, subliminal workings of its unconscious. Meaning was for the birds, or perhaps for the petit bourgeoisie. Eliot was a primitivist as well as a sophisticate, a writer who made guerrilla raids on the collective unconscious. For all his intellectualism, he was averse to rationality. Meaning in his poetry is like the mysterious figure who walks beside you in The Waste Land, vanishing when you look at it straight. When Raine enquires of a couple of lines in one of Eliot's poems whether we are supposed to be in a brothel, the only answer which would be true to Eliot's own aesthetic is that we are in a poem...

~ Terry Eagleton

of long obediences in the same direction

Those who seek fulfillment in adultery have little hope in love.

work that speaks for itself*

scattered thoughts on knitting**

As a privileged white collar worker, repetitive manual labour is not a burden. After hours of producing digitized pages of data, screens of code, and stacks of written decks, it is refreshing to slowly and meticulously create something physical and tangible.

There are no hard and fast deadlines. Though it is always satisfying to hold a finished product in your hand, much of the fulfillment comes from watching the fabric emerge from your fingertips, stitch by stitch, inch by inch.

I don't need to interpret my work. I don't have to explain how it creates value. The work speaks for itself.


It is tragic that our society has devalued manual labour and turned it into a commodity... alienated workers hunched over rows and rows of sewing machines. Is anyone else nostalgic for times when craftmanship was still common? For times when people designed, laboured and ultimately created with their own hands. And when that process of creation was not endless toil for survival, but a joyful engagement of the mind and body-- But I think I am nostalgic for times that never existed. (That's why I say, I have the privilege of enjoying manual labour, because I am not sweating 80 hours a week cleaning toilets in order to pay the bills)

In any case, I just don't want this craft to turn into a justified excuse for me to bolster my wardrobe, since in my endless knitting blog browsing, I've seen far too many people take knitting as an alternate form of consumerism-- something that I can easily see myself becoming. I would like to knit in order to give. To give to those in needs. Or to give to friends and family and implicitly say, 'I spent 60 hours (or more!) making this for you."


*this is also for teri who taught me how to knit
** this could also be called - reflections of an "N" knitter
*** the photos are of half of the sweater I am currently working on for http://www.knitforkids.org. (my 3rd official project, 4th one if you count my disaster pot-holders/dish rags.)

why new york is so unhappy

The large points first: Most happiness researchers agree that being surrounded by friends and family is one of the most crucial determinants of our well-being. Yet New York, as surprisingly neighborly a city as it is, is still predicated on a certain principle of atomization. Being married would help in this instance, obviously. But New York City’s percentage of unmarried adults is nine points higher than the national average, at 52 percent.

Then there’s the question of the hedonic treadmill, such a demonic little term, so vivid, so apt. Isn’t that what New York, the city of 24-hour gyms, is? More charitably put, one could say that New York is a city of aspirants, the destination people come to to realize dreams. And of course we should feel indebted to the world’s dreamers (and I thank each and every one, for creating jet travel, indoor plumbing, The Simpsons), but there’s a line between heartfelt aspiration and a mindless state of yearning. Darrin McMahon, the author of Happiness: A History, shrewdly points out that the Big Apple is a perfect moniker for the city: “The apple is the cause of the fall of human happiness,” he says. “It’s the symbol of that desire for something more. Even though paradise was paradise, they were still restless.”

Which is where the subtle thesis of Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice comes in. He argues, with terrible persuasiveness, that a superabundance of options is not a blessing but a certain recipe for madness. Nowhere do people have more choices than in New York. “New Yorkers should probably be the most unhappy people on the planet,” says Schwartz, a psychology professor at Swarthmore. “On every block, there’s a lifetime’s worth of opportunities. And if I’m right, either they won’t be able to choose or they will choose, and they’ll be convinced they chose badly.”

Economists have a term for those who seek out the best options in life. They call them maximizers. And maximizers, in practically every study one can find, are far more miserable than people who are willing to make do (economists call these people satisficers). “My suspicion,” says Schwartz, “is that all this choice creates maximizers.” If that’s the case, New York doesn’t just attract ambitious neurotics; it creates them. It also creates desires for things we don’t need—which, not coincidentally, is the business of Madison Avenue—and, as a corollary, pointless regrets, turning us all into a city of counterfactual historians, men and women who obsessively imagine different and better outcomes for ourselves.

~ excerpts from an article I didn't finish reading because it was too long, but seems to have some fairly good things to say

New York is an unhappy place because it trades the deep and meaningful relationships for endless nights of restaurants, clubbing, bar hopping, and consumption of 'interesting things to do' and 'interesting things to see.' It is precisely, a city of interminable choice. It is a city for consumers. You come here. You take what you can get out of it and you leave (and probably go to Jersey). *

New York is not a city of neighbours. (Who knows their neighbours?) Neighbours care about the place where they live. People don't come to New York because they want to contribute to making this place better, help the homeless or get to know the people who live next door to them. No, they come here because they want to experience New York City. To soak up its sights, its sounds, its foods, its drinks, its clothes, its people and then return to their overpriced, shoe-box sized apartments..... But if you are constantly taking, you are inevitably going to leave empty.

It is with cities as it is with sex. We seek the physical city and find only an agglomeration of private cells. In the city as nowhere else we are reminded that we are individuals, units. Yet the idea of the city remains; it is the god of the city that we pursue, in vain.

Its heart must have lain somewhere. But the god of the city was elusive. The tram was filled with individuals, each man returning to his own cell.

V.S. Naipaul wrote that about London. Perhaps this is also true about New York. Except every city has a different god. For New York, the glittering, flashing billboard forever reminds you that if you buy the rights things, see the right shows and go to the right restaurants, you will indeed experience New York City.... **


* Obviously, I'm not saying that everyone has no true friends in New York. In fact, alot of people I know have close friends in the city. But what I'm referring to, is a general spirit of the city, and the millions of people that come filtering in (and out) each year.
** But what is New York City? Does it even exist? Is it not just an elusive idea? A vain myth? If you follow the chain of signs, you'll soon seen that it only returns back to itself, and never leads to anywhere real.

the most important thing

[2] the ramblings of a not-so-single girl before Valentine’s Day [2]

the most important thing i have learned from being in a relationship is how to forgive.

the best decisions

usually the best choices in life are the ones that we are most scared of taking. they feel a bit like stepping off the firm edge of a rock cliff, into a hazy, insubstantial fog. but really, we just have what is solid and what is mist confused.

Let him who walks in darkness and has no light trust in the name of the LORD and rely on his God.
Behold, all you who kindle a fire, who equip yourselves with burning torches! Walk by the light of your fire, and by the torches that you have kindled! This you have from my hand: you shall lie down in torment.

~ Isaiah 50

a time for machetes

This is a book review on A Time for Machetes by journalist Jean Hatzfield. (The book review is called On Evil, is by Theodore Dalrymple and is found in the New English Review). A Time for Machetes is based on various interviews Hatzfield had with perpetrators and victims of the genocide. Here’s simply more evidence that we are all capable of doing tremendous wrong (and that just because we’re all capable, does not make us not responsible):

I have long been preoccupied by the problem of evil. Not being a philosopher, I have no satisfactory explanation of evil to offer, nor even, indeed, a satisfactory definition of it. For me, evil is rather like poetry was for Doctor Johnson: easier to say what it isn’t than what it is. All I know for certain is that there’s a lot of it about - evil, I mean, not poetry.

Why? Is the heart of man irredeemably evil, or at any rate inclined to evil? What are the conditions in which evil may flourish?

My medical practice, admittedly of a peculiar kind, in a slum and in a prison, convinced me of the prevalence of evil. I was surprised. I had spent a number of years in countries wracked by civil wars and thereby deprived of even minimal social order, precisely the conditions in which one might expect evil to be widely committed, if only because in such situations the worst come to the fore. But nothing prepared me for the sheer malignity, the joy in doing wrong, of so many of my compatriots, when finally I returned home. Every day in my office I would hear of men who tortured women - torture is not too strong a word - or commit the basest acts of intimidation, oppression and violence, with every appearance of satisfaction and enjoyment. I would once have taken the opening sentence of Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments for a truism:

How selfish soever man may be supposed, there is evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.

But now I no longer think it is even a truth, let alone a truism. I would be more inclined to write:

How good soever man may be supposed, there is evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the suffering of others… etc., etc.

I have seen so much, both at home and abroad, that I am not easily taken aback. When you have heard of baby-sitters who impale babies on railings in order to quieten them during a televised football match, or of men who suspend their girlfriends by their ankles from the fifteenth floor balcony, and this kind of thing daily for many years, you develop a kind of emotional carapace. One almost begins to take a pride in one’s own unsociability, which one takes to be a kind of sophistication. It is a form of spiritual pride, I suppose. Still, I nevertheless read a book that shocked me. It was about the Rwandan genocide, called A Time for Machetes, by a French journalist called Jean Hatzfeld. He interviewed several men who had taken part in the genocide, probably the most murderous in human history, at least in terms of numbers of deaths per day while it lasted, and were now imprisoned. One of them was under sentence of death.

As it happens, I had been to Rwanda only a handful of years before the genocide. I was travelling across Africa by public transport, so that I could see African life from below, as it were. I passed through several extraordinary countries, for example Equatorial Guinea, where the first (democratically elected) president after independence from Spain had been overthrown and executed by his nephew. Francisco Macias Nguema was one of the great unsung political monsters of the Twentieth Century, the century par excellence of political monsters. He kept the national treasury under his bed, had all people who wore eyeglasses executed on the grounds that they were dangerous intellectuals, introduced forced unpaid labour and killed or drove into exile a third of the population. His nephew who overthrew him, who until then had been his accomplice, was somewhat of an improvement, though still a dictator (and to this day is President): whenever he left the capital, the power supply was switched off as no longer being necessary.

I am ashamed now of the superficiality of my understanding of Rwanda of those days. I knew, of course, that Burundi (through which I had also just travelled) and Rwanda were mirror images of one another: that in Burundi it was the Tutsi minority that massacred the Hutu people, whereas in Rwanda it was the other way round, and that it was rather difficult to decide who had started this most vicious of vicious circles. But by comparison with many African countries, Rwanda seemed a well-run state, comparatively uncorrupt, its people industrious to a fault, and far from wretchedly poor, despite being one of the most densely populated countries in Africa, if not the world, with an astonishingly high natality. I knew, of course, that it was a dictatorship, the dictator being Major-General Juvenal Habyarimana, and that every Rwandan, ex officio as it were, was a member of the one party of the one-party state, the Mouvement national revolutionnaire pour le developpement (MNRD), from birth. But at the time, I was not very optimistic that multi-party politics, of the kind that the dictator was forced to introduce in 1991, would necessarily represent an improvement. In a way, I was right: the most efficient slaughter in human history took place three years later.

In that slaughter, in the space of three months, neighbours killed without compunction those with whom they had been friendly all their lives, only because they were of the different, and reputedly opposing, ethnic designation. They used no high-tech means, only clubs and machetes. Women and children were not spared; husbands of mixed marriages killed wives, and vice versa. The participation of the general population in the slaughter was its most remarkable feature: usually in mass murder, it is the state that does the killing, or rather the state’s agents, since the state is an abstraction without an existence independent of those who work for it. Hatzfeld, the African correspondent of the French left-wing newspaper, Liberation, went to interview some of the perpetrators a few years after the genocide. They were friends who took part in the murder (if that is not too slight a word for it) of 50,000 of the 59,000 Tutsis who lived in their commune.

Oddly enough, being in prison gave them the ability to talk about what they had done, if not honestly, at least with some degree of freedom. I do not know to what degree Hatzfeld, who interviewed them individually and at length, edited the transcript of his interviews, and of course we have no way of knowing how representative his witnesses are: but their testimony is perhaps the most startling ever committed to paper.

There is no real remorse for what they did, only regret that it landed them in their current predicament. They feel more sorry for themselves than for their victims, or the survivors. They are not even altogether unhappy in prison, and look forward to resuming their lives where they left off (before the genocide) as if nothing too much had really happened - or should I say been done by them? They hoped for, and expected, forgiveness on the part of the survivors, amongst whom they would have to return to live, because resentment and bitterness are useless emotions and because they (the perpetrators) had all been gripped by a collective madness. This, of course, absolved them in large part from personal responsibility.

For three months, the men would get up, have a hearty breakfast, gather together, and then go on hunting expeditions of their former neighbours, who had fled to the nearby marshes. They would hack anyone they found to death; and then, when the whistle blew in the evening for them to stop their ‘work’ (they regarded it as such), they returned home, had a quick wash, had dinner and socialised in a jolly way over a few beers. Their wives would be - for the most part, though not universally - content, because Tutsi property was thoroughly looted, and distributed according to the individual efficiency and ruthlessness of the killers. One of the most haunting things in this book, if it is possible to pick anything out in particular, is that many of the victims did not so much as cry out when caught by the murderous genocidaires: they died in complete silence, as if speech and the human voice were now completely worthless, redundant, beside the point. I have often wondered why the people went into the gas chambers silently, without fighting back, but I suppose that when you witness absolute human evil committed by the people with whom you once lived, and who, at least metaphysically, are just like you, you see no point in the struggle for existence. Non-existence, perhaps, seems preferable to existence.

The murderers were pleased with their work, they thought of all the corrugated iron roofing, cattle and so forth that they were ‘earning’ by it. They had never been so prosperous as during this period of slaughter and looting. Unaccustomed to eating meat very often (the Tutsi were pastoralists, the Hutu cultivators), they gorged themselves upon it, like hyenas finding an abandoned kill in the bush. Very few were their pauses for thought.

Let us not console ourselves with the thought that these were unsophisticated Africans, without the mental capacity to know better: in short, mere savages. Again, I do not know how much Hatzfeld has edited their words, but his perpetrator interlocutors seem to me more articulate than most of the people with whom I have had to deal in Britain as patients over the last decade and a half. Indeed, their language occasionally becomes poetic: though poetic language in this circumstance is mere euphemism.

Besides, the few comments of the survivors, mostly women, that Hatzfeld inserts into the text, are of considerable moral and intellectual sophistication, and certainly not those of unreflecting primitives with few powers of cerebration. Here is Edith, a Tutsi schoolteacher, on the question of forgiveness:

'I know that all the Hutus who killed so calmly cannot be sincere when they beg pardon, even of the Lord. [Many now pray fervently: the Rwandans were fervently religious long before the genocide.] But me, I am ready to forgive. It is not a denial of the harm they did, not a betrayal of the Tutsis, not an easy way out. It is so that I will not suffer my whole life asking myself why they tried to cut me. [Cut is the euphemism used by victim and perpetrator alike for ‘kill,’ since most of the death was dealt with a machete.] I do not want to live in remorse and fear from being Tutsi. If I do not forgive them, it is I alone who suffers and frets and cannot sleep… I yearn for peace in my body. I really must find tranquillity. I have to sweep fear far away from me, even if I do not believe their soothing words.'

Francine, a Tutsi farm woman and shopkeeper, on the other hand, says this:

'Sometimes, when I sit alone in a chair on my veranda, I imagine this possibility: one far-off day, a local man comes slowly up to me and says, ‘Bonjour, Francine, I have come to speak to you. So, I am the one who cut your mama and your little sisters. I want to ask your forgiveness.’ Well, to that person I cannot reply anything good. A man may ask for forgiveness if he has one Primus [beer] too many and then beats his wife. But if he has worked at killing for a whole month, even on Sundays, whatever can he hope to be forgiven for? We must simply go back to living, since life has so decided… We shall return to drawing water together, to exchanging neighbourly words, to selling grain to one another. In twenty years, fifty years, there will perhaps be boys and girls who will learn about the genocide in books. For us, though, it is impossible to forgive.'

No, it is impossible to console ourselves with the thought that the Rwandans are so different from us that they and their experiences have nothing to say to us. Edith and Francine are, indeed, more dignified, more articulate, more intelligently reflective, than most of the victims of small-scale evil in an English slum whom I have met.

This book penetrates deeper into the heart of evil than any other I have ever read. The author makes no claims for his work: he is still mystified by it himself. But if you want to know what depths man can sink to - an important thing to know, when your argument is that things are so bad that they cannot get any worse, so prudence is unnecessary - read this book. At the very least, it will put your worries into perspective.

simulated intimacy*

[1] the ramblings of a not-so-single girl before Valentine’s Day [1]**

But in all that casual sex, there was one moment I learnt to dread more than any other. I dreaded it not out of fear that the sex would be bad, but out of fear that it would be good. If the sex was good, then, even if I knew in my heart that the relationship wouldn’t work, I would still feel as though the act had bonded me with my sex partner in a deeper way than we had been bonded before. It’s in the nature of sex to awaken deep emotions within us, emotions that are unwelcome when one is trying to keep it light.

On such nights the worst moment was when it was all over. Suddenly I was jarred back to earth. Then I’d lie back and feel bereft. He would still be there, and if I was really lucky, he’d lie down next to me. Yet, I couldn’t help feeling like the spell had been broken. We could nuzzle or giggle or we could fall asleep in each other’s arms but I knew it was play acting and so did he. We weren’t really intimate — it had just been a game. The circus had left town.

Whatever Greer and her ilk might say I’ve tried their philosophy — that a woman can shag like a man — and it doesn’t work. We’re not built like that. Women are built for bonding. We are vessels and we seek to be filled. For that reason, however much we try and convince ourselves that it isn’t so, sex will always leave us feeling empty unless we are certain that we are loved, that the act is part of a bigger picture that we are loved for our whole selves not just our bodies.

...

Our culture — both in the media via programmes such as Sex and the City and in everyday interactions — relentlessly puts forth the idea that lust is a way station on the road to love. It isn’t. It left me with a brittle facade incapable of real intimacy. Occasionally a man would tell me I appeared hard, which surprised me as I thought I was so vulnerable. In truth, underneath my attempts to appear bubbly, I was hard — it was the only way I could cope with what I was doing to my self and my body.

...

The misguided, hedonistic philosophy which urges young women into this kind of behaviour harms both men and women; but it is particularly damaging to women, as it pressures them to subvert their deepest emotional desires. The champions of the sexual revolution are cynical. They know in their tin hearts that casual sex doesn’t make women happy. That’s why they feel the need continually to promote it.

~ excerpts from Casual sex is a con: women just aren't like men, written by Dawn Eden***, the author of The Thrill of the Chaste: Finding Fulfillment While Keeping Your Clothes On

sex is more than just physical.
sex is spiritual.

*please see the simulated experience of sex which in retrospect should probably have been called the simulated experience of love....
**to see last year's version of this, please go here and press 'previous' to scroll through the whole series. (there are four total)
*** please read the comments to this post. i've been informed that dawn eden is a scam :P

i'm a cliche

consultant bio continued...

I just recently realized that I'm a walking cliche. I'm a consultant in New York City. I knit. I'm 'into poor people'. I'm dating a guy in a rock band. I listen to obscure independent and international music. I like artsy movies. I've traveled to some not-so-common places like Honduras and Argentina.

I'm your cliche young professional/recent graduate, high-powered ready-to-climb-corporate-ladder by day and trying-hard-to-be-interesting by night.

Am I someone who, because she works the same job that everyone else in New York works, obsessively tries to amass 'interesting' points via her after-hours activities?

...or, am I someone who is trying to learn to love the poor because Jesus identifies with the poor (and who doesn't succeed all that often), who likes to knit because it's enjoyable to do manual labor and to create something with one's own hands. and who, despite the overlooming shadow of financial instability, really loves the guy in the rock band?

least of these

Just as the health of a society can be calibrated by the welfare of its most outcast*, so the character of a person can also be measured or she treats the least and the lowest.

[janitors, maids, street-sweepers, waitors, bellmen, taxi drivers, prostitutes, drug dealers, drug addicts, elderly people, homeless, illegal immigrants, day laborers, thieves, murderers, jesus]

The righteous will answer him, saying 'Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?'

And [Jesus] will answer them, 'Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these, you did it to me.'

~ from Matthew 25

*Does anyone remember the exact quote?

update

my little excursion to Christmas and Urbana has left me a little behind on my 'one-blog-entry-per-week' goals, so here's a little personal update:

*christmas in philadelphia was delightful :)

*i was also there in st. louis. here's proof:





*going forward, i am staffed in washington, dc for the next four months. new york/philadelphia on weekends.

thoughts on hope

I feel like hope is a word rarely used in its fullest sense in today’s conversation. We hope that some guy might like us back. We hope that we might get that promising job offer. We hope that we will get an A on that last test we took. We always hope for things that remain in the realm of possibility. If it does not seem likely, we prefer not to hope. Instead of hoping and risking disappointing, we resign ourselves to accepting that it cannot happen, and settle for something less.

Perhaps this accords better with the dictionary definition: to cherish a desire with anticipation; to desire with expectation of obtainment; to expect with confidence: TRUST.

But is it really hope to eagerly expect something that we can see? To await something that we’re pretty sure that we can achieve?

At the very least, I know that as Christians, we can actually hope (in fact, we must hope) for more than what seems attainable by human means, because our hope is based in a God who can do immeasurably more than what we ask for or even imagine. When we do not hope, or hope for little, it is not that we are being realistic, but that we lack faith.

Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our own lifetime, therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history, therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone, therefore we must be saved by love.

~ Thomas Merton

Cowardice keeps us ‘double minded’ – hesitating between the world and God. In this hesitation, there is no true faith – faith remains an opinion. We are never certain, because we never quite give in to the authority of an invisible God. This hesitation is the death of hope. We never let go of those visible supports which, we well know, must one day surely fail us. And this hesitation makes true prayer impossible – it never quite dares to ask for anything, or if it asks, it is so uncertain of being heard that in the very act of asking, it surreptitiously seeks by human prudence to construct a make-shift answer.

What is the use of praying if at the very moment of prayer, we have so little confidence in God that we are busy planning our own kind of answer to prayer?

~ Thomas Merton

Hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he already has? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.

~ Romans 8:24-25

Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.

~ Hebrews 11:1

how to be merry

The assumption under the advertising and the money that flows around this season is: consume more and you will be merrier!

But we should all know better than to believe advertisers...

some alternative suggestions from the economists:

What sumptuary advice do they offer? In general, the economic arbiters of taste recommend “experiences” over commodities, pastimes over knick-knacks, doing over having. Mr Frank thinks people should work shorter hours and commute shorter distances, even if that means living in smaller houses with cheaper grills. The appeal of such fripperies palls faster than people expect, they say. David Hume suggested that “the amusements, which are the most durable, have all a mixture of application and attention in them; such as gaming and hunting.”

That, it turns out, is not easy. Happiness, as measured by national surveys, has hardly changed over 50 years. The rich are generally happier than the poor, but rich countries do not get happier as they get richer. The Japanese are much better off now than in 1950, but the proportion who say they are “very happy” has not budged. Americans too have remained much as Alexis de Tocqueville found them in the 19th century: “So many lucky men, restless in the midst of abundance.”

~ from Happiness and economics: Economics discovers its feelings

a few thoughts from scripture:

Better one handful with tranquility than two handfuls with toil and chasing after the wind.

~ excerpt from Ecclesiastes 4

Whoever loves money never has money enough;
whoever loves wealth is never satisfied with his income.
This too is meaningless.

As goods increase,
so do those who consume them.
And what benefit are they to the owner
except to feast his eyes on them?

The sleep of a laborer is sweet,
whether he eats little or much,
but the abundance of a rich man
permits him no sleep.

I have seen a grievous evil under the sun:
wealth hoarded to the harm of its owner,

or wealth lost through some misfortune,
so that when he has a son
there is nothing left for him.

Naked a man comes from his mother's womb,
and as he comes, so he departs.
He takes nothing from his labor
that he can carry in his hand.

~ excerpt from Ecclesiastes 5

complications of choice

We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are - that is the fact.

~ Jean-Paul Sartre

I just stumbled upon this from my friend Angela's blog and the thought that popped into my mind was 'democracy'. Especially the part about "We do not know what we want", because perhaps, we don't know what's good for us.

race to the top [2]

race in the academy

Just some interesting excerpts from two articles I stumbled across last week…. I don’t really have any particular responses to them right now, other than I do agree that they pose interesting questions that can’t be answered easily:

Is race just a scapegoat for the problems of society when we should actually be looking at class? Is race an excuse for us to not talk about economic inequality? Would it ever be possible to extricate class from race, as history has inexorably intertwined the two? And how does the ‘framing of the question’, the vocabulary of interpretation, the lens of analysis, or whatever you want to call it, alter our conclusions? [And perhaps also, if you could really eradicate identity politics, or racial understandings of society and history, what would that solve? By erasing race from our discourse, and insisting on avoiding it altogether, do we deny something valuable about ourselves?]

This first article in the Chronicle addresses Princeton’s new African-American studies department and discusses race in higher education:

My point, then, is that the commitment to African-American studies, like the commitment to Asian-American studies, is a commitment to describing our social problems in a way that will make all of us — teachers as well as students, alumni as well as parents — feel comfortable. It does this by racializing injustice at a moment when race is less relevant to injustice — at least to the injustice done by elite universities — in America than it has ever been. Rooks quotes Orlando Patterson as saying, "The doors are wide open for ... black middle-class kids to enter elite colleges." The relevant term here is "middle-class." African-American- and Asian-American-studies programs tell us that, from the standpoint of social justice, the crucial thing about us is our identity, at the very moment when, again from the standpoint of social justice, the crucial thing about us is our wealth and what the upper middle class sees on that television show is not the image of its own virtue (that's what make us comfortable), but the reverse face of its own success.

Another reason is that these programs are the places where questions about the meaning of race (and its handmaiden, culture) get raised. No assertion is more common in American intellectual life today than the insistence that race and class (and gender) are inextricably intertwined, and, in a certain sense, this is obviously true. Everybody has a household income; everybody's descended from somebody; everybody's male or female or some combination of the two. But one of the things that thinking seriously about race makes possible is not just the imbrication of race with class, but the disarticulation of class from race. We live in a society where the struggle to achieve racial equality is not the most profound of the challenges that face us. A program in African-American studies that helps us to understand not just the importance of race but its limits (not just its relevance but its irrelevance) will be well worth the money Princeton plans to spend.

This article in The Nation reviews the books The Trouble with Diversity:

The Trouble With Diversity is a bracing jeremiad, an all-out assault on the way identity in general, and race in particular, is used to organize society. It is also a thought experiment in which Michaels invites us to remove our race-tinted glasses and view the world in the class-based terms that, he argues, actually define it. For Michaels, there is no middle ground, no room for compromise: Race shoved class out of American consciousness, and he wants to reverse the situation. "We love race--we love identity--because we don't love class," he writes. The alternative is not to "love" class, since Michaels knows that class, unlike race, is distinctly unlovable. Class inspires no "National Museum of Lower-Income Americans on the Mall" in Washington, and no special holidays celebrating the culture of the poor (indeed, the "culture of poverty" is a sociological epithet); while some poor people inherit their poverty, we would all agree with Michaels that it would be perverse to think of it as their "heritage." The only area in which we are sentimental about poverty is in studies of working-class culture and literature, in which class is considered a form of identity.

Furthermore, Michaels accused contemporary champions of postidentity theory--those who envisage identity as contingent, performative and fluid--of employing the very racial essentialism they oppose. The more we emphasize culture and diversity, he scolded, the more we become mired in race. We inevitably answer the question "What should we do?" in terms of "who we are"--an appeal to racial/ethnic identity. The quest for identity is a vicious circle in which one can never escape the nineteenth-century notion of race. "For racial identity to become a project, it must turn to culture; for cultural identity to become a project, it must turn to race," he wrote.

i'm so proud of my brother

Despite the fact that I have to spend all of tonight editing my brother's college essays, I'd just like to say that I'm super proud of him.

He recently made a Nintendo Wii joystick that is selling on Ebay currently for $86 bucks, check it out :)

His blog is Project Wonderland.

ME (consultant bio)

For my job, I recently had to write a biography of myself in order to help give more information about myself for project staffing. This was the end result*:

L. Lu graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Pennsylvania in 2006. She was part of the Huntsman Program for International Studies and Business. L. studied Spanish and spent a semester abroad in Buenos Aires. [In addition to avid traveling, she volunteered with a church located in the slums, and conducted independent research on poverty demographics.]**

L. was involved with a variety of groups throughout college, including Intervarsity Christian Fellowship, and Propaganda Silk (a literary magazine). After her junior year, L. interned with ABC Company. She then spent two weeks in Honduras, teaching Excel and Word classes in Spanish and helping reorganize a bookstore’s inventory systems. Upon graduation, L. spent six weeks living in a lower-income neighborhood in North Philadelphia, volunteering at a homeless shelter for women and children.

In her free time, L. enjoys reading, watching movies, and writing. She is also beginning to dabble into photography and knitting.

I was quite disgusted with the result. Despite the fact that all the information in it was true, the impression that it gives bears no resemblance whatsoever to myself. As my beloved NT boyfriend would put it:

The bio makes it sound like you're an experience junkie who can't possibly be a whole person, and who is riddled with affluence-guilt and trying to compensate for it, while simultaneously feeding the experience-idolatry with a continual fodder of the exotic Other.

What disappoints me most about this bio is that it says nothing about my motivations and values. It makes it seem as though I care about poverty as some sort of ‘cool identity’. As though I did the things I chose to do because it would make me more ‘interesting’. Though I do confess that I have brought up these things in conversation in hopes of making myself slightly more interesting and more appealing to talk to, I don’t think that was ever the motive for doing those things.

But if you take the bare bone events of my life, and fail to apply the appropriate framework to interpret them, I do become a farce, an empty shell of a person…

Once again, have I been betrayed by words?
(Or rather, are words more powerful than we think they are?)***

*My name is initialed, because I’m really paranoid about having my full name online even though it's out there in the comments section. Same goes for the company I work for… That’s what Facebook is for, not my blog.
**That sentence was cut out of the final version I submitted. It was a little too disgusting for me.
***This line should be revised. Please read comments to this post.

consultant life

in between spaces

profiting from the non-profit

I confess to having an occasional (well, perhaps frequent, but often repressed) affinity for fashion magazines (e.g. Vogue, In Style, Lucky etc…), and am momentarily allured by the pages of fashion and glamour -- the illusion, that perhaps if I bought the right clothes, and wore the right make up, I might actually look socially adept.*

In recently looking at the “Improper Bostonian”, a humor/fashion/rich people magazine that proliferates on the doorstep of my far-too-expensive corporate apartment that I do not pay for, I was glancing through an article on the “10 with style: Meet 10 stylish Bostonians”.

For one profile, the reporter writes “The wife and collaborator of best-selling mystery writer Robert B. Parker is a supporter of numerous charitable causes and always appears looking smashing at fundraisers, receptions and opening nights.”

This little snippet reveals the culture surrounding philanthropy—social status, fashion, and the purchase of morality. Sometimes, it seems that there is much less concern about the actual charities (and the various challenges and problems associated with the causes they are supporting), than about the people who are giving and what they’re wearing.

This seems to further confirm conversations I’ve had with people who currently work or have worked in philanthropy and non-profits. Donors are often insistent on the importance of having their names recognized according to the amount of money they’ve donated. Non-profits often are forced to function as corporations, with donors as their customers. The products they offer are social status, moral righteousness and personal acclaim. As a result, so many well intentioned non-profits are forced to spend time and energy on pleasing their donors than focusing on their actual causes.

[By no means am I saying that it is bad that money is given towards various good causes (nor am I implying that every philanthropist is like this), but it’s sad to see generosity tainted by the pursuit of status and personal glory. Since when did your clothes matter more than the organization that you’re giving to? It makes it seem as though the only part of ‘anthropy’ being loved in philanthropy is oneself. And it makes me wonder if philanthropists ever really experience the rewards of humble and anonymous giving.]

* I usually stop reading once I realize that first of all, they’re rather high school and every issue says the exact same thing; and that second of all, the more I read them, the less content I am with what I have and who I am.

l'enfer, c'est nous (hell is us)

unbearable lightness / burdensome weight

an interesting observation from Zach's blog:

I think it's a very sad fact of the human condition that we cannot conceptualize a state of being in which we would enjoy living forever. Our existence is fundamentally flawed - paradoxically, we are terrified of both death and eternal life.

... which in my mind touches upon some points made in C.S. Lewis passages (and the thesis of his book The Great Divorce):

"Christianity asserts we are all going to on forever, and this must either be true or false. Now there are a good many things which would not be worth bothering about if I am going to live for ever. Perhaps my bad temper or my jealousy are gradually getting worse so gradually that the increase in my lifetime will not be very noticeable- but it might be absolute hell in a million years- in fact, if Christianity is true, hell is the precisely correct technical term for it... Hell begins with a grumbling mood, always complaining, alwyas blaming others... but you are still distinct from it. You may even criticize it in yourself and wish you could stop it. But there may come a day when you can no longer. Then there will be no you left to criticize the mood or even to enjoy it, but just the grumble itself, going on forever like a machine. It is not a question of God 'sending us' to hell. In each of us, there is something growing, which will BE Hell unless it is nipped in the bud."

"Earth, I think, will not be found by anyone to be in the end a very distinct place. I think earth, if chosen instead of Heaven, will turn out to have been, all along, only a region in Hell: and earth, if put seecond to Heaven, to have been from the beginning a part of Heaven itself."

Perhaps Jean Paul Sartre is in part right: "L'enfer, c'est les autres" (Hell is other people). Except that, hell isn't just other people- it is us.*

*Or perhaps, more correctly, it is in us.

people you meet

After my flight today, I ended up sharing a cab with this other woman, Lorna Sass. Is she famous? Am I supposed to know who she is? She makes herself seem all important on her website, and earns enough money from cookbooks and cooking classes to live on the Upper West Side alone. Maybe she was offended because I didn't know who she was...

I also met someone who made a comment about never being able to teach at a community college (vs. being a researcher at a top university), because people would look down on him, even if he enjoyed teaching far more than doing research-- Would you rather have better social status and hate what you do than have lesser social status but love what you do? I should hope not. I guess I can detect the same hungering for status inside me, but I've never had the boldness to say it so bluntly: "Wouldn't you not want to teach because people would look down on you?"

SMART goals

The staffer at the company I work for recommended some three months ago that I should make a set of 5 SMART goals.

Goals that are SMART are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Tangible. Being the P that I am (that’s P according to the Myers Briggs personality types), I have failed to even come up with one goal, but I’d like to try to make a few now (and see if I ever actually follow through):

1. Posting weekly on this blog, instead of monthly. This means being a little more spontaneous with my entries, and allowing them to be more open ended and slightly more personal. And hopefully the posting can actually be more than weekly, but it’s hard to predict the eb and flow of workload. For awhile, I really wanted my entries to be polished, but this is a blog, not graduate school.

2. I would also like to finish knitting the sweater that I’m working on …. by February. And then start knitting socks. En route to becoming what Armine’s girlfriend has dubbed ‘kninja’. (I’ve already knit two scarves that are soon to be gifts! Pictures are below, modeled on Matt. I think he should pursue a modeling career—he's certainly mastered the aloof and distant facial expressions).

3. Call my family twice a week, instead of once.

4. Write atleast one meaningful letter or email to someone each week.

I can’t think of anything more right now. Let’s see if these goals stay SMART, or whether they will become SMRT (Specific, Measured, Realistic, Tangible, but not Attained).

the problem with education

Nothing coherent here since I'm not sure how I feel about the issue, but here are couple of dangling thoughts and responses to things I've been reading*:

John Derbyshire critiques educational theorists in his article "The Dream Palace of Educational Theorists" in The New English Review for making faulty assumptions about human nature, namely that we are a blank slate, on which nurture is everything, and nature is negligible.

[Do I want to believe his assertion that the course of our lives are already inscribed into our DNA? Not really, though I will admit that freedom as conceived by postmoderns, is an illusion and a farce (appropriately so, that freedom has no essence). Is then my only other option to be one of those crazy left-wing liberals who believe more government funds means social transformation? I hope not.]

A few noteworthy excerpts unrelated to John Derbyshire's main point, that take a jab at today's "education" system:

"Towering over all these lesser scams is the college racket, a vast money-swollen credentialing machine for lower-middle-class worker bees. American parents are now all resigned to the fact that they must beggar themselves to purchase college diplomas for their offspring, so that said offspring can get low-paid outsource-able office jobs, instead of having to descend to high-paid, un-outsource-able work like plumbing, carpentry, or electrical installation.**"

"Professionals have their own credentialing systems: You may have graduated law school, but you’ll still have to pass the bar exam, and so on. Then why make aspiring lawyers go to law school? Presumably for the same reason we insist on cube jockeys having bachelor’s degrees from accredited four-year colleges. Why not let them study up at home from Teaching Company DVDs, then sit for a state-refereed common exam when they feel they’re ready? Why not let lawyers learn on the job from books and as articled clerks, the way they used to? I don’t know. College-going is just an irrational thing we do, the way upper-class German men used to acquire dueling scars, the way women in imperial China had their feet bound. Griggs vs. Duke Power probably has something to do with it. Since, following that decision, employers are not permitted to test job applicants to see how intelligent they are, the employers seek a college degree as a proxy for intelligence."

It's beginning to resemble the corporation***. Creating needs that were not there before so that the organization can justify its own existence. How very cyclical (it's almost like a perpetual motion machine!) and meaningless.

* I've finally realized that if I wait until I have coherent thoughts before making a posting. I NEVER post anything. And when I do, someone always manages to refute my argument, rendering it as obsolete and useless as a undergraduate degree :)
** A good article on this very subject is Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew Crawford in the New Atlantis
*** And by corporation, I mean the EVIL CORPORATION. I have to write that in caps because I can't take myself seriously when I say that. That terms been thrown around so much I'm not sure what it means anymore.

Atheism the New Religion

Below are some excerpts from a recent article in Wired magazine examining atheism as an intellectual movement. Gary Wolf conducted interviews with several famous atheists including Richard Dawkins.

The Church of Non-believers

If trained theologians can go this far, who am I to defend supernaturalism on their behalf? Why not be an atheist? I've sought aid far and wide, from Echo Park to Harvard, and finally I am almost ready to give in. Only one thing is still bothering me. Were I to declare myself an atheist, what would this mean? Would my life have to change? Would it become my moral obligation to be uncompromising toward fence-sitting friends? That person at dinner, pissing people off with his arrogance, his disrespect, his intellectual scorn – would that be me?

~

Among the New Atheists, Dennett holds an exalted but ambiguous place. Like Dawkins and Harris, he is an evangelizing nonbeliever. He has campaigned in writing on behalf of the Brights and has written a book called Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. In it, the blasting rhetoric of Dawkins and Harris is absent, replaced by provocative, often humorous examples and thought experiments. But like the other New Atheists, Dennett gives no quarter to believers who resist subjecting their faith to scientific evaluation. In fact, he argues that neutral, scientifically informed education about every religion in the world should be mandatory in school. After all, he argues, "if you have to hoodwink – or blindfold – your children to ensure that they confirm their faith when they are adults, your faith ought to go extinct."

When I arrive at the farm, I find him in the midst of a difficult task. He has been asked by the President's Council on Bioethics to write an essay reflecting on human dignity. In grappling with these issues, Dennett knows that he can't rely on faith or scripture. He will not say that life begins when an embryo is ensouled by God. He will not say that hospitals must not invite the indigent to sell their bodies for medical experiments because humans are endowed by their creator with inalienable rights. Ethical problems must be solved by reason, not arbitrary rules. And yet, on the other hand, Dennett knows that reason alone will fail.

We sit in his study, in some creaky chairs, with the deep silence of an August morning around us, and Dennett tells me that he takes very seriously the risk of overreliance on thought. He doesn't want people to lose confidence in what he calls their "default settings," by which he means the conviction that their ethical intuitions are trustworthy. These default settings give us a feeling of security, a belief that our own sacrifices will be reciprocated. "If you shatter this confidence," he says, "then you get into a deep hole. Without trust, everything goes wrong."

It interests me that, though Dennett is an atheist, he does not see faith merely as a useless vestige of our primitive nature, something we can, with effort, intellectualize away. No rational creature, he says, would be able to do without unexamined, sacred things.

“Can intelligent robots be religious?" it occurs to me to ask.

"Perhaps they would," he answers thoughtfully. "Although, if they were intelligent enough to evaluate their own programming, they would eventually question their belief in God."

Dennett is an advocate of admitting that we simply don't have good reasons for some of the things we believe. Although we must guard our defaults, we still have to admit that they may be somewhat arbitrary. "How else do we protect ourselves?" he asks. "With absolutisms? This means telling lies, and when the lies are exposed, the crash is worse. It's not that science can discover when the body is ensouled. That's nonsense. We are not going to tolerate infanticide. But we're not going to put people in jail for onanism. Instead of protecting stability with a brittle set of myths, we can defend a deep resistance to mucking with the boundaries."

This sounds to me a little like the religion of reason that Harris foresees.

"Yes, there could be a rational religion," Dennett says. "We could have a rational policy not even to think about certain things." He understands that this would create constant tension between prohibition and curiosity. But the borders of our sacred beliefs could be well guarded simply by acknowledging that it is pragmatic to refuse to change them.

I ask Dennett if there might not be a contradiction in his scheme. On the one hand, he aggressively confronts the faithful, attacking their sacred beliefs. On the other hand, he proposes that our inherited defaults be put outside the limits of dispute. But this would make our defaults into a religion, unimpeachable and implacable gods. And besides, are we not atheists? Sacred prohibitions are anathema to us.

Dennett replies that exceptions can be made. "Philosophers are the ones who refuse to accept the sacred values," he says. For instance, Socrates.

I find this answer supremely odd. The image of an atheist religion whose sacred objects, called defaults, are taboo for all except philosophers – this is the material of the cruelest parody. But that's not what Dennett means. In his scenario, the philosophers are not revered authorities but mental risk-takers and scouts. Their adventures invite ridicule, or worse. "Philosophers should expect to be hooted at and reviled," Dennett says. "Socrates drank the hemlock. He knew what he was doing."

With this, I begin to understand what kind of atheist I want to be. Dennett's invocation of Socrates is a reminder that there are certain actors in history who change the world by staging their own defeat. Having been raised under Christianity, we are well schooled in this tactic of belated victory. The world has reversed its judgment on Socrates, as on Jesus and the fanatical John Brown. All critics of fundamental values, even those who have no magical beliefs, will find themselves tempted to retrace this path. Dawkins' tense rhetoric of moral choice, Harris' vision of apocalypse, their contempt for liberals, the invocation of slavery – this is not the language of intellectual debate but of prophecy.

In Breaking the Spell, Dennett writes about the personal risk inherent in attacking faith. Harris veils his academic affiliation and hometown because he fears for his physical safety. But in truth, the cultural neighborhoods where they live and work bear little resemblance to Italy under Pope Urban VIII, or New England in the 17th century, or Saudi Arabia today. Dennett spends the academic year at Tufts University and summers with family and students in Maine. Dawkins occupies an endowed Oxford chair and walks his dog on the wide streets, alone. Harris sails forward this fall with his second well-publicized book. There have been no fatwas, no prison cells, no gallows or crosses.

a simulated person

There is no real Paris Hilton
(Killing yourself to live)

Paris Hilton said to hell with her private self. She erased the boundary between her life and her career and turned her entire existence into a public story and herself into a “brand,” as she has put it. She deliberately and programmatically offered herself up to us as an “It,” a being without an inner life, a personality whose only value is to be seen and known by all. She is, in other words, the total incarnation of postmodern identity, the individual who has disappeared completely—and happily—into her image.

~ from The Trash Princess on the City Journal

As my former fridge magnet once said, “It’s not discovering your identity, it’s about creating it.” Though this slogan appears initially appealing, its instantiation comes at a cost. Paris Hilton created her identity. She annihilated her private life for the pursuit of her public image. She pursued fame and became the epitome of fame, but now that’s all she is (we usually become the things that we pursue).

[So if we create our identities in such a way that does not accord with our intrinsic identities*, then we risk losing or perhaps even destroying ourselves.]


*That is, the identity that we discover, if it does indeed exist.