I’ll be in Auckland, New Zealand, this Saturday night for a lecture. Same topic I’ve lectured on in the past eighteen months in Los Angeles, London, Tiberias, Antwerp, and Manila: “Kabbalah and Christian practice”.
If you’re a Kiwi near your largest city (or just a visitor in town), and have nothin’ to do on a Saturday night, come on by the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Albert Street.
A mini-autumn hiatus begins today; blogging resumes December 1. I’ll be hither and yon, but will try to moderate as best I can.
I wish I had more time to respond to this Kay Hymowitz piece: Love in the Time of Darwinism. (Cap tap to Rudy.)
Hymowitz is best known as author of Marriage and Caste in America, one of the less-unfortunate texts in the cottage industry of publications devoted to the notion that lifelong heterosexual union is all that stands between us and the apocalypse. Those who want government to abjure responsibility for providing protections for the vulnerable are always quick to see marriage as the panacea for a host of problems. In some sense, arguments about what marriage ought to be are indeed very close to the core of some of our biggest contemporary cultural debates. Four times married — and in this last one, happily so — count me in the corner of those who argue against the over-promotion of the institution!
In any case, in this article Hymowitz takes on the modern dating scene, which offers any commenter of any political persuasion much opportunity for lamentation. But Hymowitz is primarily worried about the impact on we men-folk, who are apparently overwhelmed and bewildered:
Today, though, there is no standard scenario for meeting and mating, or even relating. For one thing, men face a situation—and I’m not exaggerating here—new to human history. Never before have men wooed women who are, at least theoretically, their equals—socially, professionally, and sexually.
By the time men reach their twenties, they have years of experience with women as equal competitors in school, on soccer fields, and even in bed. Small wonder if they initially assume that the women they meet are after the same things they are: financial independence, career success, toned triceps, and sex.
Oy. All of those women going to college and playing sports? They want husbands and babies and little fluffy puppies. But not money, independence, strong bodies, or that nasty sex stuff. And if they pretend they want money or orgasms, they are poor deluded dears who have bought into the lies promoted by… by… by women’s studies professors, of course.
In any event, Hymowitz catalogs the bad behavior of SYMs (single young men) and — this is strikingly original — lays the blame squarely on women.
Adding to the bitterness of many SYMs is the feeling that the entire culture is a you-go-girl cheering section. When our guy was a boy, the media prattled on about “girl power,†parents took their daughters to work, and a mysterious plague seemed to have killed off boys, at least white ones, from school textbooks. To this day, male-bashing is the lingua franca of situation comedies and advertising: take the dimwitted television dads from Homer Simpson to Ray Romano to Tim Allen, or the guy who starts a cooking fire to be put out by his multitasking wife, who is already ordering takeout. Further, it’s hard to overstate the distrust of young men who witnessed divorce up close and personal as they were growing up. Not only have they become understandably wary of till-death-do-us-part promises; they frequently suspect that women are highway robbers out to relieve men of their earnings, children, and deepest affections.
Bold emphasis mine. My head is starting to hurt. It’s Ray Romano’s fault? No, it’s all down to divorce — the kind where hard-working and reliable men get abandoned by flighty women who, with the help of a unjust legal system designed by the pantsuited and the predatory, steal everything from their husbands, who are (like all men, really) naive babes-in-the-woods. Wise young lads, these, to learn such important lessons! As the kids said in my day, gag me with a spoon. Continue reading
I don’t believe — and never believed — in the angels of the spirituality section at the bookstore. I never believed in the cherubim I see clustered about in rococo churches. But at least in some sense, I do believe in angels like Gabriel who spoke with Mary and Muhammed, and like the one who wrestled with Jacob and wounded him on the thigh. Those are angels with serious messages!
I’ve met some whom I cannot help but call angels, always in the guise of humans or animals. Ten years ago this past June, one of them — a tall and tired nurse in a psych ward, younger than I am now — told me it was time for me to live, and live without ambivalence. And I heard the angel, and I started to live.
In earthy vernacular or some strange and divine tongue, they speak. And if we’re lucky, we listen. This Czeslaw Milosz poem reminds us of that.
On Angels
All was taken away from you: white dresses,
wings, even existence.
Yet I believe in you,
messengers.
There, where the world is turned inside out,
a heavy fabric embroidered with stars and beasts,
you stroll, inspecting the trustworthy seems.
Short is your stay here:
now and then at a matinal hour, if the sky is clear,
in a melody repeated by a bird,
or in the smell of apples at close of day
when the light makes the orchards magic.
They say somebody has invented you
but to me this does not sound convincing
for the humans invented themselves as well.
The voice — no doubt it is a valid proof,
as it can belong only to radiant creatures,
weightless and winged (after all, why not?),
girdled with the lightening.
I have heard that voice many a time when asleep
and, what is strange, I understood more or less
an order or an appeal in an unearthly tongue:
day draw near
another one
do what you can.
I’ll admit that it isn’t easy to be a vegan and an animal rights activist on one hand, and an advocate against eating disorders on the other. Obviously, these commitments should be compatible, as the issues aren’t necessarily linked. Yet in a culture where repressive images of female beauty are used to make veganism alluring (say what you will about the generally excellent content of the book, the title “Skinny Bitch” for a text designed to encourage vegan eating is at best problematic), and in a culture where more than a few young women with body dysmorphia “hide” their eating disorders behind the more socially-acceptable facade of veganism, it’s clear that there are some problems to work out.
I’m not going to post about animal rights for a while yet. But I did want to respond to this piece from columnist Paul Campos in the Rocky Mountain News: Fight food fascists’ effrontery. (Let’s leave aside the asinine reference to fascism.)
Campos makes the case, popular with the fat acceptance movement and with at least some feminists, that the “war on obesity” is misplaced. Campos gives talks:
My talk involved points I’ve made hundreds times over the past few years, to audiences ranging in size from a dozen high school students to a few million TV viewers.
I spoke about how the definition of “overweight” used by our public health authorities is a bunch of completely unscientific garbage, created by pharmaceutical companies eager to push the next generation of diet drugs through the regulatory pipeline.
I described the absurdity of various widely held ideas about weight: that we know how to make people thinner (we don’t); that haranguing people about their weight is doing them a favor (it isn’t); and that the reason there are fat kids in America is that fat kids haven’t been informed that it’s considered desirable in this culture to be thin.
This last bit of rampant insanity, which is at the center of the government’s current response to the panic over “childhood obesity,” makes about as much sense as arguing that poor people are poor because they haven’t been informed it’s considered desirable in this culture to be rich.
Fair enough. But there’s one teensy-weensy problem with Campos’ argument. He presents the dynamic as innocent (and hungry) consumers being browbeaten by haughty fashionistas and hysterical policy wonks. The public, apparently, is shamed out of the pleasure of eating by Vogue magazine and state assembly members. And while there’s much to be said that is critical of both government food policy and the fashion industry, Campos ignores the biggest and baddest villain of them all: the agriculture industry. Continue reading
I’m getting ready to leave town again, I’ve got stacks of letters of recommendation to write, and little interest in blogging.
Last week, a publicity person from MTVu contacted me. Apparently, the Music Television people now own Ratemyprofessors, the celebrated — and lamented — website students can use to rate their teachers. I’ve written about RMP before, and did an NPR interview on the subject in 2006. (The last time I wrote about the site, my ratings were immediately hacked. I suspect that will happen again.) In any case, the PR person from MTV wanted me to know that I had been “chosen” as “America’s hottest professor”, and that an annoucement to that effect was coming this week.
The announcement has come today, apparently: two people have already emailed me this link. My dear friend and Pasadena City College colleague Derek Milne joins me on the “top ten” list, apparently, which is nice to see. I note, not insincerely, that my own sense is that our positions ought to be reversed.
I debated whether to blog about this at all. It’s an odd “award” to receive — the best way I can describe it as flattering and humiliating at the same time. I also have some doubt about the integrity of the process — are a handful of devoted fans somehow jacking up the ratings? As I’ve said before about RMP and similar sites, there’s no sure way to tell that those who are doing the rating are actual students. I’m told the site checks IP addresses, but couldn’t a single student (or perhaps my mother?) with access to multiple computers submit multiple entries and hotness points? I don’t know enough to know the answer to that, but it’s another reason to feel a bit, well, flustered. Continue reading
The first post with a title such as this is here.
One of my students sent me a Facebook message last night; she wants to come in for a chat about politics and theology. Raised in a conservative Christian (Reformed) household — the sort where Five Point Calvinism is taken seriously — she shocked her parents three weeks ago by coming home with an Obama bumper sticker on her car. Her mother and father tried to convince her, she said, that the “only way a Christian could vote” was against Obama and for the Republican ticket. (To be fair, her parents agonized, she said, as to whether to vote for Alan Keyes, a marginal and comical far-right African-American figure, or to vote for McCain-Palin. They ended up voting for the latter.)
My student’s parents cited abortion and gay marriage as the two most important issues, trumping all others on the ballot. As far as they are concerned, authentic and thoughtful faith can lead to only one possible set of conclusions about God’s intent for sexuality, reproduction, and life itself. “A vote for Obama is a vote against Christ”, my student reports her father saying. She and her parents share the same house, but things have not been the same. Though her parents were relieved and pleased Proposition 8 passed (banning gay marriage), they have been depressed by the rest of the results state and nation-wide, indicating a fairly significant shift towards the political and cultural left. And some of that depression is manifesting in iciness towards their only daughter. She’s pretty unhappy, and in her message last night, asked “Is there anything you can give me that can help me convince my parents it’s possible to be a good Christian and a liberal?”
I don’t know about “convincing” anyone. I’ll give my student the usual bible verses (Micah 6:8, for starters), but with the caveat that getting into a “proof-text war” with one’s nearest and dearest is generally a recipe for disaster: lots of shouting and gesticulating with one hand while clutching one’s preferred translation in the other. This sort of unproductive and unpleasant exchange is familiar to many who have grown up in religious households. And of course, we can make the Scripture say what we want it to say. Lefties like me can find every phrase in the Good Book which emphasizes the central importance of justice, particularly economic justice, as most pleasing to God; righties, like my student’s parents, can find every phrase in that same text which centers sexual righteousnesss in the Christian moral universe. (Call it the “pelvis” versus “pocketbook” wars.) Continue reading
In the current issue of the Weekly Standard, poet and editor J. Bottum reviews the new Patrick French biography of the celebrated Anglo-Indian-Caribbean author, V.S. Naipaul. I haven’t read the French book, but I have read some things by the 2001 Nobelist, who is not one of my favorite authors. I read the review more out of fondness for Bottum, who is a magnificent essayist and a fine third-rate poet. (Third-rate is not an insult in my book. If Shakespeare and Dante are first-rate, Yeats and Auden second-rate, and Rod McKuen ninth-rate, then third-rate is a good thing to be.)
Bottum notes the tendency in literary biography towards de-mythologizing celebrated writers by revealing their pettinesses, their narcissism, and their abysmal people skills. But even by the modern execratory standard, the French biography reveals Naipaul to be a world-class wretch:
Naipaul shows himself arrogant beyond belief, and vile-tempered, and as self-obsessed as a man simpering while he looks at himself in the mirror. His letters and conversation are full of references to “niggers” and dismissals of Africans and dark-skinned Indians.
The man was capable of bouts of extraordinary cruelty: Unhappy with Margaret at one point, Naipaul explains, “I was very violent with her for two days. .  .  . Her face was bad. She couldn’t appear really in public. My hand was swollen.” But then, he was capable of ordinary, everyday cruelty, as well: “You are the only woman I know who has no skill,” his wife’s diaries reveal Naipaul once told her, just in passing. “You behave like the wife of a clerk who has risen above her station.” He moved on to the mistress who would become his second wife because his inamorata Margaret had simply grown unworthy of his use: “middle-aged, almost an old lady.”
Bottum writes, not unreasonably, that “I didn’t need to know all this…” And he’s right. We don’t need to know this about the writers we admire, even if, as in the case of the all-too-much alive Naipaul, he apparently wants us to know it. Naipaul evidently authorized this biography, cheerfully turning over pages and pages of material documenting his sadism, his snobbery, and his deeply depressing inability to muster anything even remotely approaching empathy for other living creatures. There’s no sense, according to Bottum, that Naipaul is confessing behavior of which he is ashamed and for which he seeks absolution. Rather, he just wants the world to know who he is and what he was, without apology or embarrassment. It’s very ugly, and it walks the line between pathetic and appalling.
And more to the point, as Bottum rightly points out, it ruins Naipaul for any thinking reader. Bottum’s review is an excellent reminder of the reasons why I don’t enjoy reading literary biographies, at least not of authors whose works I admire. I’m not unhappy to know of the peccadilloes of great politicians or musicians, because my appreciation of their achievement is not contingent upon an imagination that they are a particular way in their private world. Whether or not Mick Jagger is a saint or a monster or something in between will not affect the pleasure I take in hearing him perform: whether or not FDR was faithful to Eleanor doesn’t change my view on the overall success of his presidency. But when it comes to novelists and poets, writers who draw me into their own particular vision of reality, who show me new ways of thinking about people and things and relationships, then yes, their private behavior does impact how I read their work. And to know too much can spoil things completely for me. Continue reading
My friend Bill sends me an interesting email:
Have you ever had a ‘vegan slip’? Eaten meat or animal products only because you couldn’t resist them? Do you think it might be interesting to see if others do? And I don’t mean the times you had traces of eggs are milk becuase you were in a situation where options were limited.
While I’m still on a self-imposed hiatus from blogging about animal rights issues, I think I can answer this one safely.
First off, I’m a bit leery of using the language of “slips” around veganism (even though I have used the term myself). “Slipping” is a term used by addicts in recovery to describe a relapse. My friend Bill and I have both spent plenty of time in Twelve Step programs; in my case, it was those programs that helped me stop drinking and using drugs. I haven’t had a drink or an illicit drug in well over a decade, and if I were to “pick up” and use again, that would indeed constitute a mighty slip.
But I don’t think of veganism as a recovery program from the disease of carniverousness. It’s true that I tend to approach virtually everything in my life through the lens of addiction and recovery, and that’s obvious in my writing. But that’s a psychological foible rather than a philosophical perspective. And though it’s tempting to do pull a President Bush (who spoke of our nation being “addicted to oil”) and use the language of addiction to describe the attachment most folks have to meat consumption, I’m not going to do it. Not only is it medically an inappropriate term to use, using a word like “addiction” (or its related terms, like “slip”) to describe the relationship people have with animal products makes the mistake of centering human beings and their feelings, rather than the rights of animals, in the discussion. And that’s the wrong tack to take.
But this is not the time to re-hash the moral case for veganism. Leaving aside the words Bill uses, the question are good ones to ask of any vegan: “Do you ever get tempted to eat animal products? What do you do? Have you ever eaten meat or dairy or eggs (consciously, rather than by accident) since becoming a vegan?”
Part of being vegan is eating a balanced, plant-based diet. It’s easy to be a “junk-food” vegan, after all. And I find that when I don’t get enough protein (beans, soy, hemp rice, peanut butter and so forth), I do feel an urge to eat meat. But I catch myself every time, reminding myself that it’s not a steak I crave, but rather the protein within the steak. My cravings are, I’ve learned, always in response to obvious nutritional deficiencies. It’s quite liberating — at least for me — to discover that my longings for certain foods can be controlled by eating sensibly. A craving for meat comes very rarely, and it can easily be assuaged with something else. It’s usually just a sign I’ve gotten a bit lazy in ensuring that I’m eating a wide variety of plants!
I have not eaten animal flesh since a few “slips” (hah, there’s the word) in 2005. But in the last two years, the years in which I have been most intensely vegan, I have made the conscious decision to consume dairy or eggs. I haven’t done so in the USA; all of my recent adventures into lacto-ovo vegetarianism have come abroad.
I can think of two occasions in particular. In January, we were on our Antarctica cruise; my wife and I were the only vegans on the trip. The catering staff on the ship did their best by us, but sometimes — especially towards the end of the voyage, as fresh food supplies dipped, they ran into trouble. And one night at dinner, all they had for us (besides chicken and fish) was cheese lasagna. I had been getting by for days on salads and nuts, hemp shakes and vegan bars. I was tired of feeling so deprived; more than 1000 miles from a decent health food store, I didn’t have a lot of choices. I could have survived without the lasagna, but I chose to eat it. I felt sick afterwards, but yes, it tasted good.
In August, when we were in Croatia, the same thing happened. This time, the choice to eat dairy came in a restaurant in Dubrovnik. I was sick of pasta with marinara sauce and soggy lettuce. I ordered a cheese pizza, and it was very satisfying. Some countries are easy in which to be vegan (Thailand and Israel come to mind); others are murderously challenging (say, Argentina and France). I go easy on myself when I am away from my usual sources of tasty plant-based nutrition. It is not unlikely that dairy or egg products will cross my lips on some future foreign trip.
Veganism is not akin to sobriety. In AA, we learned that if we took a single drink, we lost our sobriety. I know the last date I consumed alcohol: June 27, 1998. Except for communion and kiddush wine in tiny doses during religious ceremonies, I have not had a drop of any alcoholic beverage since that date. But I don’t have a “vegan date.” My veganism is not about measuring my own purity or my own health. My veganism happens to have the happy byproduct of good health, but that’s not it’s purpose. I am vegan because I want to be as justice-centered as possible in my food choices. The “as possible” reflects the reality that I can’t do it perfectly. Animals die in the process of growing plants and making car tires, after all.
But as I’ve said a thousand times, and will say a thousand times again, there’s no point in letting the impossibility of perfection be a reason to stop pursuing the most ethical life possible. The best cannot be allowed to be the enemy of the good. I will never run as fast as Paula Radcliffe, but run I can. I will never be able, as a prosperous American, to undo all the harm that is done sustaining the life I lead. But I can take a great many steps to mitigate that harm, and to mitigate it significantly. Eating vegan food and buying vegan clothes is one very tangible way to do that. And when I don’t do it perfectly, for whatever reason, I don’t put on the metaphorical hair shirt. I let myself be human, and then return to the task of doing the best I can.
One motto I learned early in recovery is useful here: ‘do the next right thing’. 99.9% of the time, the ‘next right thing’ for me to eat is something vegan. One time in a thousand, I might choose cheese – not out of a failure of principle but because of a failure of other options, and a failure to plan perfectly. And I’m not going to beat myself up for that. I’ll just do the next right thing.
NOTE: This is not the place to raise the old and bitter arguments about animal rights, vegan philosophy, and so forth. This is a post about what it means to try and live ethically, with the knowledge that on occasion, one falls short of the mark. The post is about how to think about what it means to fall short. It is not the time to question the merits of pursuing that particular goal in the first place.
One of the memorable figures of my childhood and youth, Edie Karas, has died. On the Monterey Peninsula where I was raised, Edie and her late husband Sam were institutions in the intersecting worlds of local politics, higher education, and the arts. Edie founded the Gentrain program at Monterey Peninsula College in which she and my mother taught for many years. In 1987, Edie co-led a tour of northern Italy which gave me my first chance to see the glories of Florence, Venice, and Milan. She was a dear friend; a remarkable woman and a devoted public servant, and I honor her legacy and her memory.
She came to our family Christmas party each December for more than thirty years. We will miss her very much this year.