The Captured Perspective

Alan Jacobs has a fascinating post on the future of memoir in a Facebook age at his blog, Text Patterns. Reflecting on his teaching of the memoirs of Augustine, Richard Rodriguez, and Marjane Satrapi’s, he writes:

All three of these authors are, in their varying ways, displaced persons — displaced from homeland, or upbringing, or culture, or language, or some combination thereof — and that displacement is one of the major prompts for memoir and other forms of self-narration. The person taken out of the environment in which he or she was formed is almost forced to reconsider the self and its components, is almost forced into redefinition. And one of the classic ways to achieve a successful redefinition is by telling one’s own story, in large part because through telling it one discovers what it is.

Alan’s explanation of the power in memoir is succinct and deeply true. It is for primarily for this reason that I keep coming back to memoir as a genre in my own free reading, attempting to find certain self-narrations that help me make sense of my own life, goals and desires. On my night stand right now is Christian Wiman’s Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet, a book of which I hope to write more on in a later post.

Jacobs continues on in this post to reflect on the future of memoir for people from the Facebook generation, questioning:

Does Facebook make self-narration less compelling, less necessary? In a much talked-about essay, Peggy Orenstein has speculated that Facebook denies to young people “an opportunity for insight, for growth through loneliness”; it makes it harder for them “to establish distance from their former selves, to clear space for introspection and transformation.” Maybe it also eases — or hides from us — our displacements, and creates a false sense of seamlessness in lives that have actually undergone significant ruptures

While Jacobs’ outlines a fascinating theory here, I don’t know if I completely buy it. To help flesh out some thoughts, I went back to Orenstein’s original article in the Times. In this piece, she writes of her concern that her necies will not have the space for necessary self-development in their upcoming journeys to college; specifically, she questions whether they will be able to explore and redefine their adult identities with “450 closest friends watching, all tweeting to affirm ad nauseam (their) present self?” Point taken, and it especially resonates with me given my tendency towards fulfilling the identity expectations that others have for me.

Orenstein goes onto argue that, “something is drowned in that virtual coffee cup — an opportunity for insight, for growth through loneliness.” In essence, Facebook circumvents loneliness and introspection for the individual. It is here where I think Orenstein and Jacobs misdiagnoses the role of Facebook on youth psychology. Loneliness is not removed in Facebook; if anything, it is amplified. Nothing makes one feel more alone than seeing a constant stream of self-selected photos from another person’s life, the parties they attend, and the new friends they are making. Nothing makes one pain of disintegrating high school friendships more acute as being a distant (but seemingly present) observer of their transformations. Though Facebook as a communication medium provides space for connection, as a voyeuristic space, it is more likely to cultivate existential isolation.

So, if as Orenstein seems to argue, Facebook make life into a “virtual coffee shop,” it is closer to the coffee shops I experience on a day-to-day basis than any sort of social ideal. We do not walk into Starbucks and see good friends at every table. Rather, we see familiar but nameless faces, and are known only by the snapshots they have of what we do in that place. In overhearing snippets of conversations between friends we do not know, we are surrounded by people but profoundly alone. If that does not cultivate a breeding ground for self-reflection and self-narration, I do not know what will.

Susan Boyle’s popularity is blowing up following her appearance on Britain’s Got Talent.  If you haven’t seen the video yet, take a look above… you will be the 13th34th+ million person to do so!

The massive popularity of this clip is interesting because its ability to capture our attention hinges on the psychological disconnect between our expectations and her actual performance.  The live audience, judges, and youtube watchers all place Susan in the ‘bust’ category before she starts singing, and only upon her fantastic rendition of Les Mes do we pull back such valuation.

This categorization tendency is not unique to Boyle.  With talent shows like BGT, we tend to infer some type of correlation between ‘pop’ attractiveness and singing talent, and thus assume the worst when someone doesn’t have this look. Being that American Idol is seemingly in its 4500th iteration, I have seen several of these busts live. The situation is the same every time… someone like Susan comes onto the stage, we expect her to be horrible, and she does not disappoint in singing out of tune, failing to have any level of self-awareness, and then acting crushed when told to go home. What catches us off guard about Susan’s performance is that her actual singing is so far removed from our expectations.

People have understandably been profoundly moved in viewing this clip.  Her performance has been forwarded to me via email several times, and it is bouncing all over the blogosphere.  Richard Beck, a psychology of religion professor and fantastic blogger, writes:

“This performance, in so many ways, is such a profoundly spiritual lesson. One of the judges spoke of cynicism. How diagnostic that is of both myself and the age we live in. No one expected this kind of beauty, of song and spirit, existed within Susan Boyle. We were prepared to laugh at her and judge her for our own amusement and entertainment… But the power and grace of her performance judged us all.”

But while there is truth in what Richard is saying… the power and grace demonstrated here is limited.  And this limitation is diagnostic of the limitations of how we attribute value to people in interaction.

Over at the academic blog The Immanent Frame, the current book-de-jour is “Justice: Rights and Wrongs” by philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff.  In it, Wolterstorff argues for the difficulty of grounding a rational/ foundational account of human rights, and concludes by articulating his own theistic account.  He summarizes the goals of this project in the following post:

I want to re-emphasize the structure of my discussion about secular accounts of human rights.  The project of trying to ground human rights is the project of trying to find what it is about human beings that gives each and every one a dignity sufficient for their possessing human rights.  I hold that Kantian-style accounts are entirely adequate for grounding the rights of those human beings who have the capacity to engage in rational action, the capacity to form, follow, and revise life-plans, or whatever.  There has been some discussion in the philosophical literature recently pointing out that persons have this capacity to different degrees, and that, consequently, this capacity does not secure equality of worth.

In other words, in building accounts for human rights, we attempt to find something shared across all people that gives them worth.  Unfortunately, anytime we do this, we find that not all people have this capacity, or they do not have it in equal abilities (for example, those with highly limited cognitive abilities).

The irony of our response to Boyle is that is affirms the problems of human rights talk that Wolterstoff highlights.  We are willing to grant people worth if they have rational capabilities, but not if they lack such capacity.  In this case, we are willing to give performers the time of day and a level of dignity if they have talent, and in turn, nothing if they are talentless.

Boyle’s performance makes us feel bad for our initial categorization, but ONLY BECAUSE we find out that she really does have talent! This clip does much less to make us question this underlying assumption that human worth flows from specific capacities or capabilities. The problem of our response is not one of mis-categorization, but rather one that emerges more deeply out of the way we link people’s worth too intimately to innate capabilities or capacities. Only when this link is ruptured will grace and power truly abound.

I want to identify three forces that I find interesting and perhaps related: 1) American society is guided by the self-regulating market and a culture of individualism; 2) We are the most Christian and religiously devout nation in the west; and 3) Americans, both men and women, have gotten steadily less happy over the past 100 years despite living in one of the most opulent nations in modern history.

I recently picked up the Conquest of Happiness by Bertrand Russell in which he writes:

I was not born happy. As a child, my favorite hymn was: “Weary of earth and laden with my sin.” In adolescence, I hated life and was continually on the verge of suicide, however, I was restrained by the desire to know more mathematics. Now, on the contrary, I enjoy life; I might almost say that with every year that passes I enjoy it more.

This is due in large part to a diminishing preoccupation with myself. Like others who had a Puritan education, I had the habit of meditating on my sins, follies, and shortcomings. I seemed to myself – no doubt justly – a miserable specimen. Gradually I learned to be indifferent to myself and my deficiencies; I came to center my attention increasingly upon external objects: the state of the world, various branches of knowledge, individuals for whom I felt affection. External interests, it is true, bring each its own possibility of pain: the world may be plunged in war, knowledge in some direction may be hard to achieve, friends may die. But pains of these kinds do not destroy the essential quality of life, as do those that spring from disgust with self.

This speaks strongly to both my life experience and frustration with the church, but also hints at a potentially inherent antagonism between capitalism and Christianity.

The primary religion of our culture emphasizes the depravity of the human nature. The institution that has largely guided American social transformation for the past two-hundred years, market capitalism, is centered in the primacy of self-interest. With our economics leading us to focus on ourselves, and our religion on how fallen and broken we are, is it surprising that we aren’t getting any happier?

Despite my frustrations, I am a Christian and believer in the usefulness of markets – seeking an alternative way to understand faith and society through a lens of human flourishing, not depravity and selfishness.

St. Louis Shaw Neighborhood Home

In my first post in this series, I introduced the ten principles of New Urbanism and posed the following question: how can we best explain the rationale behind this intent to live in community with a diversity of individuals? In the following post, I offer a few tentative proposals for expanding the diversity of interactions in communities which, though already statistically diverse, lack much interaction across this diversity.

First off, what do I mean by diversity? Diversity signifies different things for different groups of people. For example, some people might consider a diverse community as a group of people that have varied background experiences living together. Another person might ignore the experiences component, and value a commitment to racially mixed neighborhoods. Taking this into account, I will structure the definition for this post after the New Urban principle (since the initial conversation started from an examination of New Urban principles): diversity of people – of ages, income levels, cultures, and races.

So what does diversity in the US look like along these dimensions?  The 2008 United States Census Bureau estimates racial division in this country as follows: non-Hispanic whites 68%, Hispanics 15%, African American’s 12%, and Asian Americans 5%. Given racial segmentation by community, few if any cities fall exactly into this pattern, as this percentage emerges only in the aggregate.

What about diversity of income and age? Though the US demonstrates significant income disparity, the amount of interaction across financial diversity is limited in so much as people are stratified across income levels. Wealthy families often isolate themselves in exclusive neighborhoods, and lower socioeconomic groups have to find neighborhoods affordable from an income perspective (hint: these two neighborhoods don’t overlap). Nursing homes, retirement communities and the small number of cross-generational households families in the US — as compared to hispanic cultures, for example– show similar clustering patterns across age groups.

There are, however, communities that exemplify the diversity principles of New Urbanism. For example, my current neighborhood in Saint Louis, Missouri, partially follows this model. The Shaw Neighborhood has slowly gentrified as a group of young non-Hispanic white families have moved into a neighborhood that was largely African American following the white flight of the 1960′s. Age diversity remains as these young families are juxtaposed to a relatively large contingent of older African American residents. Today, the racial composition of Shaw is 50% African American, 50% non-Hispanic white, and incomes range from those of the upper class to residents living in Section 8 subsidized housing. On paper, the Shaw Neighborhood has achieved something unique in the American landscape – a racially heterogeneous, multi-tiered income community.

However, in moving beyond the demographic statistics, my experience in Shaw has not felt that diverse. I have been disappointed by the lack of activities between neighbors and saddened by segregated streets, all leaving me somewhat confused as to how this experience matches up with the “stats” on paper. Though I live in a statistically diverse community, I rarely interact with my neighbors through any social or public forums, and I have not had experiences that have enriched my understanding of other cultures and races.

This experience leads me to two disparate conclusions about the ongoing debate for diverse communities. First, it is possible to structure and live in diverse communities as defined by the New Urban principles. These communities, whether organic like the gentrifying Shaw, or planned through zoning and regulation in New Urban communities, can physically be accomplished. Second, this planned and realized diversity does not necessarily lead to more diverse interactions at an individual level.

One way to create diverse interaction within diverse communities (somewhat which doesn’t flow as easily as I expected) is to structure in a commitment to the public institutions present in our everyday life– what Richard Beck calls informal third places in a recent blog post. Schools are one such institution.  Because the St. Louis Public Schools are significantly below public standards, families in the Shaw Neighborhood separate by those who can afford to send their children to the private Catholic schools and those who send their children to the local public schools– either as a result of financial or principled reasons, or because it serves as a natural default position.  Though the public school system have the potential to be a common social space that all families share, its performance problems have left it as another wedge expanding the gap between the financial “haves” and the “have nots”. Outside of improved schools, we need more large scale events available for residents regardless of income or age, such as farmers markets that cater to both affluent clients and those who need to use EBT food stamps. Finally, James Howard Kunstler’s critique of suburban sprawl at TED provides an interesting proposal of what social spaces must look like to create this type of diverse interaction– architectural techniques for creating ‘outdoor public rooms’ for interaction.

The previous points are but a few ways that an already ‘diverse’ community can come together in interaction, rather than remain a segregated across races, ages and incomes. Though diverse neighborhoods have the potential to enrich the social fabric of communities, it will take certain intentional practices at both the individual and policy level to reshape our everyday life experiences and facilitate such interaction.

In response to my last post on job choice, Carrie makes an interesting point that is worth responding to.  She writes:

This process of figuring out my career path was largely tied up in gender identity. Part of my need to “live independently” (ie. more than a day’s drive from where I grew up) was to figure out what I really wanted in my life as an adult versus what I had been taught by my mother to want as a female (ie. don’t develop a career because it’s best for society if your first priority is mothering).

There is something deeply true about this statement, that the heart of decision-making is deeply interwoven with how we see the world, how we infuse it with meaning, and how we conceptualize the ‘good.’ For Carrie, this is tied in with her identity as a woman as constructing what that meant in comparision to what she was taught to believe.  My passionately-held, pre-rational views of success drive my career decisions.  These operate more directly on my behavior than the post-hoc justifications I offer for my choices.

For example, my decision to pursue a PhD at a surface level was to learn more, to think better, and to place myself in opportunities to develop and share expertise.  At a deeper level, however, this decision was motivated by a desire to do something different than everyone else, to pursue a path which validated my individuality. Tied up in my own insecurity about a lack of individuality (or intelligence, or talent) were specific strategies for its alleviation.

Philosopher Charles Taylor explains this deeper level effectively in his book “A Secular Age.” His example stands as an explanation of the motivations at the core of worldview changes between one ‘rooted’ in faith to one ‘rooted’ in science. He writes:

The story that a covert to unbelief may tell, about being convinced to abandon religion by science, is in a sense really true. This person does see himself as abandoning one world view (“religion”) because another incompatible one (“science”) seemed more believable. But what made it in fact more believable was not “scientific” proofs; it is rather that one whole package: science, plus a picture of our epistemic-moral predicament in which science represents a mature facing of a hard reality, beats out another package: religion, plus a rival picture of our epistemic-moral in which religion, say, represents true humility, and many of the claims of science unwarranted arrogance. But the decisive consideration here was the reading of the moral predicament proposed by “science”, which struck home as true to the convert’s experience, rather than the actual findings of science. This is the sense in which what I’ve been calling moral considerations played a crucial role; not that the convert necessarily found the morality of “science” of itself more attractive — one can assume that in a sense the opposite was the case, where he bemoaned the loss of faith — but that is offered a more convincing story about his moral/ spiritual life.

I find this reading–  that of the “epistemic-moral predicament”–  quite persuasive with regards to the motivations underlying career decision.  Though we often justify decisions with a rational cost-benefit analysis, these decisions hinge on this deeper epistemic-moral level.  We become academics because we see something courageous about exploring the world and discovering truth.  We become investment bankers because we are drawn to the power and risk of the trade. We move away from home because we FEEL the moral pull of autonomy, and DESIRE the creativity of this journey.