Cumulative biographical anecdotes in Alexandria continue to reveal how the ideological content and posture of Authors may differ, often sharply, from that of their preceding or otherwise formative generations.
In honor of the great American holiday forthcoming, born of the Age of Reason, now celebrating both liberty and the backyard flame of truth, feel free in this open thread both to reflect and to grill yourselves as to what extents your current beliefs, perspectives and understandings have been arrived at solely through what you would regard as your own independent reason or irreason and to what extents you find them shaped through some reaction to those beliefs, perspectives and understandings within which you were or continue to be formed.
And, of course, a happy and safe Fourth of July to all concerned.
H. M. Stuart
Alexandria
What? No comments? OK, I’ll bite.
“[to] what extent your current beliefs, perspectives and understandings have been arrived at solely through what you would regard as your own independent reason or irreason and to what extents you find them shaped through some reaction to those beliefs, perspectives and understandings within which you were or continue to be formed.”
A good question. First, ain’t no such thing as anything within us arising solely through independent reason. Everything we do occurs in an environment shaped by our past and present. The problem with having your consciousness raised is that it’s really hard to do without already having a raised consciousness.
That said: it’s pretty clear to me that I’m the product of a white, petit bougeois moderate Republican Midwestern Lutheran family. Who didn’t markedy rebel against this upbringing, unike my cousin the former minister who ended up in inner-city Kansas City Kansas heavily involved in social action and bitterly alienated from his family and all of his past.
Who did, though, become convinced that most of the stereotypical principles and concepts supporting said WPBMRML were wrong-headed. But I am also convinced that this does not arise from pure reason–rather, we are spurred by our emotionally-driven biochemical responses to create a rational underpinning for what we intuit to be a different truth from that under which we were raised.
My faithful lfe partner and I were just discussing situation ethics–she accusing me, in mock horror, of being a situational ethicist. I remember being in the new large reading room of the renovated Grand Rapids public library as a teen, reading Situation Ethics by Joseph Fletcher, and thinking “wow! this guy is so right!” But of course my subculture totally disowned situational ethics–there are absolute laws and principles, one of which is that all rules should be obeyed and all authorities followed regardless of the consequences.
i seriously doubt that I had previously reasoned my way to denying this principle–rather, I already felt that way (that all laws and rules are malleable), and this book helped to give me a logical structure to support that. And reason alone cannot support the conclusion that reason must triumph over societal norms. The teacher will come only when the student is ready.
This is not to say that I think emotion and passion should drive our decisions–I am sympathetic to Lincoln’s statement that “Passion has helped us; but can do so no more. It will in future be our enemy. Reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason, must furnish all the materials for our future support and defence.” He was objecting to living a life by the code of Southern honor, to which I object strongly as well–but I must point out that he first had a passionate objection to that code in order to even be able to formulate that thought.
This question is extremely complex; I think I need some more coffee first. Perhaps more later.
“bourgeois”, of course.
Dunno about anybody else’s family, but mine is so full of shining examples of just about everything that I can claim filial piety whether I join the Church of Scientology, the White House plumbers, or the Tibetan Buddhists. I just googled “Search for a Usable Past” and found so many hits that I can only conclude that IS the great American quest. Under the circumstances, of course, it’s hard to find a way to be a rebel.
As I was composing the following in another thread, I realized it fit here as well. Since I was already intending something like it since seeing this thread, I’m going to paste it here with some contextual ma[e]ssaging.
We lived in Upper Darby, PA throughout my K-12 years and beyond to the graduations of my younger siblings. UD was (and almost still is) at the heart of Republican Delaware County; but more to the point, it was heavily focused on children and education. Most other concerns were covered by our being more an adjunct to Philadelphia than a suburb, going there for jobs and being a public transit hub; but, mostly, being a 1st-class township meant never having to play municipal politics because the state constitution and legislature governed us directly.
All that changed in the 70s, and starting in 1976 UD became a 3rd-class* city complete with council and mayor.
My mother ran for that first council, for an at-large seat. She had always been a registered Democrat. Her name recognition was as good as it gets, with three high school grads and two more coming. The Republican party bosses approached her even before she started garnering petition signatures, promising her a seat if she would switch her registration.
I really wish I was present for that conversation. My mother could spit in your eye and make you love her all the more. She told them “hell, no” and proceeded to campaign.
She almost did it, too. She was right behind the lowest vote-getter for at-large seats that won, and she made quite a few people nervous about the next election even before the newly elected officials took office. Once was enough — her health took a turn and never came back; she passed in 1987 — but I went door-to-door with her a number of times during the campaign, and I never saw her so happy.
Politics should be about adversarial conflict, but under civilized restraint and never losing sight of being ultimately of service to the people. Mom chose to do that from the outside looking in. I chose to do it from the inside pushing out. No choice is invalid, so long as it is a conscious one. That last is the lesson I took from my mother’s example.
* In PA, “class” refers to population size. UD was a great place to grow up in, whether township or city. It still is, though not so much as it used to be… a good old days POV, I’m sure. ;-)
I’m like wiredsisters; my family is diverse, and so I could claim some sort of filial piety no matter what course I took. When I left home for college, the nearest family were my maternal grandparents, and so that was where I would go for holidays like Thanksgiving, making the trip cross-country to see my parents with less frequency. Every year, my grandfather’s brother would join them for Thanksgiving dinner, and every year, there would be the same debate between Great-Uncle Burnham’s atheism and Fabian socialism and Grandfather’s Episcopalianism and staunch Republicanism. My father and mother cancelled each other’s votes out on election day (Mom, breaking with her parents, was the more liberal of the two), and as soon as they divorced, Dad married another woman whose votes cancelled his out; clearly sharing his politics wasn’t a dealbreaker to him in a wife. And, of course, Dad was a Greek immigrant, while Mom was a WASP who grew up in Wisconsin.
So, when I break with family tradition, I carry on a long family tradition of breaking with family tradition.
Almost my entire family is somewhere to the right of the Republican Congress. I regularly get Obama is a Muslim/fascist/whatever emails (less recently TBH). One of my sisters has gone another way and the second one I am unsure about. I was mostly a workaholic, who reads history and economics a bit. It really took the Iraq war to open my eyes and get me going. I had been growing more and more uncomfortable with the Republicans comfort with debt. The war pushed me over the edge. It is almost impossible to have a conversation with family about any political or religious issue. They are mostly true believers. No room for doubt.
Did I come by my current beliefs by force of reason? I would like to think so, but it may just be a product of being the oldest child who was responsible for everything. I had to learn to be independent. That ability, once out of the house, probably meant I would reject the principles I was taught, politically speaking, as soon as they no longer made sense, like now.
Steve
I realize I have never been completely independent all of a sudden as every road I’ve ever traveled has always been the result of an evolving, haphazard group effort.
Great.
Kristan, for some reason I replayed the following scene from “My Cousin Vinny” in my head just now:
Mona Lisa Vito: So what’s your problem?
Vinny Gambini: My problem is, I wanted to win my first case without any help from anybody.
Mona Lisa Vito: Well, I guess that plan’s moot.
Vinny Gambini: Yeah.
Mona Lisa Vito: You know, this could be a sign of things to come. You win all your cases, but with somebody else’s help, right? you win case after case, and then afterwards you have to go up to somebody and you have to say, “thank you.”
[pause]
Mona Lisa Vito: Oh my God, what a fucking nightmare!
I’d say “evolving, haphazard group effort” describes the movie aptly, and I mean that in a positive way.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104952/quotes Search on the text of the first line to find it, it’s most of the way down the page.
Thanks, Franklin. That isn’t comforting, but…ugh…oh, ellipses. Dread.
Kristan: . . . every road I’ve ever traveled has always been the result of an evolving, haphazard group effort.
Love! ; ) You know, I think probably the rest of us could or would say the same, if we saw a bit more clearly. Tennyson said “I am a part of all that I have met,” and I’m sure there are lots more sage sayings to that effect. Biologically speaking, there’s Lynn Margulis and her theory of symbiotic relationships and gene-swapping between organisms as a driving force of evolution. Then there’s Gary Snyder and his Pledge of Allegiance, which I’ve always preferred to the official one:
“I pledge allegiance to the soil
of Turtle Island,
and to the beings who thereon dwell
one ecosystem
in diversity
under the sun
With joyful interpenetration for all.”
This question filled me with dread and whirling ellipses, I must say. In fact, it’s caused several episodes of tooth-gnashing and mental composition of grim melodramatic mini-essays that I don’t have the guts, or arrogance, whichever it is, to post.
Maybe I’ll get around to it later. (insert ellipses here)
Hmm… are you both trying to tell me something? … hmm?
Is it that I use ellipses too much?
… I wonder …
I believe, Kristan, with all of my heart, that the best moment of my life was that moment I learned that not only was I not independent, but that being dependent on or interdependent with others — some of the time!! — was A Very Good Thing and to be sought out rather than avoided.
Sig: I think we should just post fantastic, fictional accounts of what we’d like independence to look like. That might be more insightful anyway.
“With joyful interpenetration for all.”
And I promise not to watch, not even through Spock-parted fingers masking my eyes; but those of you needing towels and/or bottled water, just whistle, and leave the necessary $1s in the fruit bowl in the kitchen – the one not holding your car keys – on your way out; your safe word is secret with me…
“(insert ellipses here)”
Why, I’d be glad to, Honey – I just never called mine an ellipses before…
I will grant Ulysses his divers oddities, having blinded a giant with one eye (cf. Thomas Dolbyphemus, “He Blinded Me – A Giant!“, 1983) – but Odyssey was, he was no match for Ellipses, who, haunted by the fate of the luckless Cyclops, improved his optical-survival odds by 200% via not one large eye under his brow, but three pinprick ones, seriatim…
Cyclops: the sounds of a melancholy equine pacing in his stall.
Wasn’t Ellipses a distaff cousin of Moses on Pharoah’s wife’s side of the family?
The defining moment in Greek tragedy came when Clytemnestra’s children were disposing of her belongings post-mortem: “Eurypides, I rippa* those.”
*As performed on the streets of Philadelphia by the Kelly family.
Franklin, all that ripping by the Kellys was to be expected, given that Clytemnestra’s (Aga)memnonic device was a – Regiside…
LOL!! Hey, Scott, whose Cide are you on, anyway? After all, her children did “take care” of her in her old age.
“her children did ‘take care’ of her in her old age.”
So you’re admitting what I’ve suspected for some time now – that La Ripa is actually pushing 100; and getting back to Clytemnestra (that’s Clytemnestra you’ve built to hatch your eggs, Mother Bird), it’s not generaly known that her jealousy was first aroused when she saw a play rumored to be based upon her husband’s recent dalliance – the opening night ofBalling for Concubine saw Cassandra (and Hilaire) Bulloc in the titular role.
Meanwhile, (raiders of the lost) arkaeologists are still hoping to someday unearth the legendary Penus de Milo, rumored to compensate for its missing arms via a giant third leg…
“the legendary Penus de Milo, rumored to compensate for its missing arms via a giant third leg…”
His weapon was his middle leg
Making every man a man
Hung as the dark horse he was
Got what no-one else had
Wa!
He’s got it
Yeah, baby, he’s got it
I’m your Penus, I’m your fire
At your desire…
- Bananarama (as it were), “Penus“
And speaking of third men, Franklin, our Unabashed Dictionary* defines kiwi fruit as a hairy lime…
*Our unabashed dictionary defines IUD as `love springs internal’. Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh! … I don’t get it.
– Homer reads “Playdude” magazine, “Homer the Heretic”
Damn! Looks, per Google, as if one person, and so far one only, has beat me to the (fruit) punch, in the form of commenter dharmabum06 of The BlueLine: Hockey Talk* Message Board:
“adrock is right, if he (2-2) had just been cool, robidas woulda been third man (shades of harry lime… and no a hairy lime ain’t a kiwi fruit)”
*It’s the Ho-o-o-o-o-ckey Talk women
Gimme, gimme, gimme the Hockey Talk blues.
- Stick Jabber and The Rolling Pucks, “Hockey Talk Woman”
“Mrs. Sartre, is Jean-Paul free today?”
Mrs. Sartre: “I dunno, he’s been asking himself that for years!” [Monty Python, as if you didn't know]
We can’t ever be free of our childhood–our “raisin’”, as a friend likes to say. Any more than I could be free of being a white middle-aged American. But—
For every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction. So many of us who had strong family lives, for good or ill, have a strong reaction to them. Those of us who had more tapioca families, with some unhealthy neurosis thrown in, have a less strong reaction. Which is helpful, because it allows for a more rationally-driven self-construction.
I find that my default has been to assume that what I learned at home and church is probably OK, unless proven otherwise. Luckily, I have an inquiring mind, and insist on understanding everything. So once I really really understood that “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”, and about the Iron Law of Oligarchy, then I realized that I could never put any trust, much less my life, into the hands of any power-centered hierarchical organization. Or anyone who wanted to control me. So no more Republicanism, no more organized Christianity, no more faith in the goodness of bureaucracy. The scales fell from my eyes. This is rebelliousness from the POV of those who raised me, or co-opted me later, but it didn’t stem from being a rebel spirit. It was driven by rational reaction.
My reactions are independently mine; but my rationalizations tend to be those of others who have come before me. The existence of the aforementioned rules of society were recognized long before I was born. But my own experiences of abandonment and betrayal by authority, beginning with my parents, made those rules come alive to me. Those are the galvanizing events, and they move us from our childhood to whatever our adulthood is. Which is why the key behavior is not to be more rational, but rather to learn how to escape from our abusive past by admitting the truth about it. From someplace safe.