Temple Grandin: The world needs all kinds of minds | Video on TED.com

Temple Grandin: The world needs all kinds of minds | Video on TED.com

Patsy Rodenburg: Why I do theater | Rousseau on the Arts.

Patsy Rodenburg: Why I do theater | Video on TED.com

Progress and children's rights

Itard's "...The Young Savage", and Rousseau's "Politics and the Arts."

Fascinating class. First there was Itard. We began by watching some clips from Truffault's film "The Wild Child" which I, as I always have, found very moving. Truffault found such empathy for the young boy, and he was played so brilliantly by Jean-Pierre Cargol, not, as I said in class, Jean-Pierre Leaud, although the film is dedicated to him.

What was interesting about showing the movie is not that we saw the film and could comment on the story, but rather that we saw another interpretation of the story of the Wild Child, one which understood him as being alone and scared in the world, and facing " institutionalization, a big theme for Truffault. In comparison to Itard's book, which attempts to be a more philosophical/scientific view of the boy, it underlines the one problem of the subject: the boy could not express himself in our context and so was left to be "used" towards the ends of the interpreters.

Itard's project, to examine "man in his natural, primitive state", was quickly shot down in class as having no scientific footing to stand on. The boy is now thought to have been abused and autistic, and his sample size of one hardly allows extrapolation to a general concept.

In spite of Michael's attempts to get us to focus on Itard's project, we couldn't. But perhaps it is not Itard's project that matters. What matters is our fascination with the figure of the social outcast, the child thrown out of our midst to fend for himself. Whether it is Truffault, Itard, or us reading the book, we couldn't help but feel a fundamental empathy for him, lining up our sympathies so clearly in defense of his nature and situation. We felt pity for his "alone-ness", his disadvantage. We took responsibility for it: he was abused and cast out, he was autistic, learning impaired. It wasn't his fault. Somehow, we innately feel that being in civilization is the only possible way to survive and be happy and feel anxiety about those who are left out.

So Itard may very well be right: "that moral superiority which has been said to be natural to man, is merely the result of civilization, which raises him above other animals by a great and powerful stimulus" (Itard, p.144) Our pity for him was raised by our sense of empathy for his isolation. It's how we would feel if we were cast out of society, man's natural state.

Rousseau was fun. Such a flawed and powerful document. The big questions it raised were: "how do we create good citizens," and "if family is no longer the core of society, then what is (can be)?"

The problem, to me, is how do you "create" a citizen without a totalitarian government? The failed communist states whose demise bred the faction-ism Rousseau apparently feared, is example enough of the problem of trying to accomplish this task.

The only remaining example is the USA, which poses another set of problems. I think that advertising is the very thing that Rousseau was arguing against in this text. Without foreseeing it, he imagines that any medium so connected to pleasing the audience and citizenry could never instruct. Society would be too consumed with vanity and desire for the "spectacle-makers" to risk offense. The US, and indeed the rest of the western world, although Europe's long histories help galvanize people in their identities to an extent not found in North America, is driven by the consumer culture, which is fueled by the control of desire and stimulation of growth by advertising. But what growth? I think that we've seen in recent events that this growth was false, a balloon of wants built on borrowed money. A pyramid scheme that ran out of time. And so what kind of citizens are we? Are our core values based on our relations to each other and our society? Or are they related to our possessions and ambitions?

I rather detest much of Rousseau's "Solution", but can't help to recognize the problem he outlined as being alive and well and living 250 years later, undoubtedly on a scale not even he would have anticipated. Although I'm sure I sell his imagination short.

But what to do? The Conservative government would like to legislate taste, but the idea is abhorrent to me, mainly because their taste is a throwback to a time that can't survive out of the enclaves that this particular government comes from. They want our culture to reflect the world of the straight, married family. A world I don't see thriving around me anymore. And one which excludes very good people from having, what?, franchise or agency in the world simply because they differ from the "norm".

Moreover, there's a challenge brewing in court over polygamy. The government tried unsuccessfully to prosecute on the grounds of Canada's anti-polygamy laws. The case was struck down as being un-prosecutable. The lawyer representing the government in the case told me the problem, as he saw it, is that there are more people living in what could be seen as poly-amorous relationships in Vancouver than there are in Bountiful, B.C. Cluny's story is case in point. If her boyfriend were to move in, or even stay there three nights a week with her, her ex-husband and children, the government would then have grounds to investigate, going firmly against Trudeau's famous dictate that "The government has no place in the bedrooms of the nation." But this is the power that the government seeks! The case has since been refered to the BC Supreme court for a ruling on the constitutionality of the anti-poligamy laws. If they are struck down, the only legal recourse would be to prosecute on behalf of the young girls co-opted into marriages and sex before the age of 16 (this is the preferred course of my lawyer-acquaintance).

The family as the core of our legal and moral structure is on its last legs.

So how do we structure our society if not on the family? I think the beginning of the answer lies as much in the last case as it does in the Wild Boy of Aveyron: children's rights. We're now seeing a global movement to enshrine the rights of children. Not only are they entitled to human rights as all are, but they entitled now to special rights: the right to a level of care that supersedes the parents individual authority. These rights are interesting because they do two things: they grant rights without a demand of responsibility from the rights-holder, and they legislate duty. Perhaps it's in these two poles that the beginning of a new understanding of citizenship can begin.

Government

I think our guest lecturer hit it on the head when, after talking about Confucius, said, ".. and we're only barely reaching out to scratch the surface".

In brief, my feelings about Locke are this: it's not a very deep look into the true nature of human society and nature. It felt, to me, like a political tract, as though it were using the frame of a narrative about the nature of man and civilization to justify an argument for private property and its' legal and violent defense.

Unlike Freud or Darwin, I don't think he was trying to answer a big question so much as he was trying to build a case for an idea, or belief.

I'm much more prone toward Rousseau's assessment of private property from his Discourse on Inequality:

"The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying 'This is mine', and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society."

In other words, private property is not a product of labour and an extension of Man in Nature, but a cynical product of civilization, built on the shoulders of bullying and imbalance of power.

I am fighting with my neighbor over a fence line, determined not to allow him one inch of what I think is mine. He, likewise, is determined to expand his reach to the last possible inch. Fucker. He's wrapping his property in chicken wire, built a locked gate, and has parked an ugly RV in his backyard. I don't want to see it. I hate the chicken wire. He brought in a backhoe and tore out the natural hill in front of his house (which is actually municipal property, not his), and replaced it with a horrific stone wall that bears no aesthetic connection to our surrounding landscape. He wants to cut the tops off the hundred or so trees in front of his place that denies him a view of the ocean (guiltily, I admit that most of the trees blocking my view were taken down many years ago.) Doesn't matter, he has no taste. That is, he doesn't share mine. In my opinion, he's ruining what is lovely about our rugged pieces of land on our little island.

But it's his property. He can do with it what he will.

I hate private property. But, even if we held all land in common, we would still have to deal with people who would lay claim to things and try to form an advantage over others, or just basically ruin the party for everybody. This, I think, is man's true 'State of Nature'.

There's a development on the other side of the island where all the lots have been created to make the least impact on the natural lay of the land. All owners must adhere to a strict building and use code. All amenities are shared and paid for by the strata. And no fences are allowed to be built. I want to live there. Of course, it's extremely expensive. So I'm stuck here with my RV-and-Chicken-wire loving neighbor, and absolutely no recourse but to try and get along with him.

I'm going to build a fence. As tall and long as I can, and blot him out of my life. This is the true nature of the social contract: not that we must agree to get along, but that we can't kill each other, so we're best to build walls and stay separate.

This is the legacy of Locke.

I wish we had more of Confucius in us. I wish virtue was defined by our conduct toward each other and not by our possessions. I wish the social contract governed our feelings about living together on a crowded planet, rather than our right to build fences to protect that which is ours from the use of others. I wish we had a society built on humility rather than aggressive acquisition.

Of course, I'm only scratching the surface. I know.

Violence

The readings this week were wonderful and challenging for me. I had read All Quiet before but had never read Arendt. In fact, I've never read any political theory before this year and have found it a fascinating challenge. Along with philosphy, I didn't anticipate an interest as deep as I have for them.

Unfortunately, I missed the class on this topic, but I got some of the notes. It seems like the class, an interesting phenomenon this semester, veered into the personal on this topic as well. Like dislocation, many people in the class have had experiences with war and violence in their lives that I have escaped in mine.

But I can see where "All Quiet..." would provoke that response, however. I found it such a deeply personal, deeply felt, account of soldiering that it was impossible not to respond personally. What was of great interest, of course, where the dynamics of rage that accompanied the violence. Firstly, as Arendt makes very clear, the implements of war had already begun to outstrip and outsize the human scale, reducing the soldiers to the size and vulnerability of bugs on the battlefield. While they still went into hand-to-hand combat, they seemed to view their enemy with a certain bureaucratic distance. The only thing that really provoked anger was when an enemy was "unfair", and used "cruel" weaponry like a jagged bayonnet. Otherwise, they charged and killed each other out of a certain dumb, autonomic response, winning and losing small patches of meaningless ground, and only after being rendered senseless by artillery. Violence is possible only with implements, and emerges from rage, which can only be triggered by a sense of injustice. But since there is no injustice in an imperialistic impulse, one must be created by the commanders and channeled toward an un-characterized enemy.

And so the personal rage was directed at their superiors and the army, the "Tyranny of none", as Arendt calls it. Most likely this happens because they are the only identifiable, personal target for rage available to the soldiers. But it fits perfectly with Arendt definitions of power and violence. And they also had only one outlet for feelings of love and bonding in the face of death, which were with each other. Their past life had been relegated to sentiment, which Arendt refers to as "the perversion of feeling" (p. 64).

And this is the interesting thing, for me. This junction between death and the political is a fork in the road. Arendt describes it clearly as a differentiation between the Greek quality and the modern one: To the Greeks, "it was the certainty of death that made men seek immortal fame in deed and word and that prompted them to establish a body politic which was potentially immortal" (p.68). But to us in the Western world, it seems that "Death, whether faced in actual dying or in the inner awareness of one's own mortality, is perhaps the most antipolitical experience there is." (p. 67)

We're watching this play out right now in "The War on Terror". We have an enemy that has created a pantheon of heroes who find immortality in death and have created an immortal order to rule on earth, versus us, who or not so political, but who fear death to the point that we will band together to fight them, focussing more on our own common bond and desire to survive. "Support the Troops", even if you hate the war.

This last point was also of interest to me in terms of Freud. Freud's theory that man has a natural destructive instinct, which even he had trouble supporting wholeheartedly, is given life by Arendt with her definition of violence begetting from rage which begets from a sense of correctable injustice. Rather than a primal urge, it is one now engaged in a specific circumstance. Rage becomes a tool for change, rather than just an impulse.

Relativity

I loved the Persian Letters. It made great bed-side reading. Every night, I read a few letters and fell asleep. I don't mean to dismiss the book. I genuinely did enjoy it. It wasn't a complex or dense argument, but the structure allows it to create an argument in a simple, effective way. Irony and humour are great tools. So is fiction. I kept thinking of the resent movie "Borat" as being a step-child of this book. I'm not sure that any film could have outlined the problems and contradictions of America and the "American Dream" in so concise a form as that movie, and perhaps the same can be said of "Letters" in it's time.

I loved the biting analysis of French culture and politics at the time. Letters 26 and 27 are my favorite in this regard. 26 tells of a visit to the theater where the best performances are the wordless ones from the actors in the boxes who "are visible only to the waist, and as a rule, their arms are modestly concealed in a muff." As for the real actors, they are seen to simply exchange insults with the people on the floor. In the end, he receives a letter from an Opera singer he has met, begging him to take her to Persia so she can escape the shame of her rape and illegitimate pregnancy and make a living better than the one she foresees as an aging actress.

In one short letter, he undermines French culture and high society, and underscores the deep hypocrisies faced by the lower classes and women. It reminds me of the opening scene of Cyrano de Bergerac, which accomplishes the same thing in a heroic tale. But that is the question here, is he really condemning French society? It was discussed in class that the whole storyline of Usbek's problems with his Seraglio were a cautionary tale about effect of the vacuum of leadership and repression of the classes that characterized Louis IV reign. But is it also a reminder of the freedoms available to people, especially women, in French society that don't exist elsewhere. In many letters, like 25, he comments through Usbek in a seemingly derisive tone that the women of France have neither modesty or virtue, but he describes an enviable level of freedom compared to the indentured slavery of the women of the harem. Are they truly lacking in virtue? Like much of this book, the definition of virtue lies squarely in the cultural perspective. With these men as our narrators, we develop a sympathy with their point-of-view, especially when they brilliantly and humorously critique the institutions they are witnessing, like the theater of the the church, or even the intellectuals of cafe society. But is their perspective right?

I suppose this is where the idea of relativity comes in... and it's a very Humean idea too: how do we negotiate the differences between cultures? How do we describe virtues, morality and ethics when we are faced with large cultural divides? It's where Hume fails in some respect in that he describes moral agreement among homogeneous cultures. But how do you describe the rights of women, or argue the moral quality of slavery in the gulf between two cultures as different as the Paris of Usbek's mind and the Persia of Montesquieu's imagination? Religion fails us, the law falls short because if it's necessarily local quality.

Perhaps humor is the only way to describe the differences and to undermine authority. As Arendt writes in "On Violence": "The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter" (p. 45).ot

Dislocation

So here's the confession: I didn't read Ali's "Brick Lane".

But I woke up Saturday morning and decided to go to class regardless. I was exhausted from lack of sleep, demoralized due to my inability to read more than two pages without falling asleep. But I thought: "I wonder what everyone else has to say?" And more importantly, I wondered why this book was the only book being covered in the seminar.

What I found in the classroom, was one of the best discussions I've heard. Not so much about the book, but about our lives. It was a discussion in which I participated deeply as well. Everybody, either directly or indirectly, has had a deep experience with dislocation in their lives.

The obvious ones were people like Nash, Havi and Nooshin who had immigrated to one, or, in a few cases, several, foreign lands. Their experiences and the palpable pain they described was something that we've each lived with and near.

I have been fascinated by the experience of World War II most of my life. Not so much by battles and machinery or the political history surrounding the time, but by the notion of how shocking it must have been to come face-to-face with the enemy. They didn't speak the same languages or look the same, especially in the Pacific theater. Movies that I've watched over the years have made those encounters seem horrifying. A blur of screaming, confusion. Faces that were masks of fury. Nothing recognizable. Movies, even recent ones like Eastwood's series about Iwo Jima, and Saving Private Ryan, seems to me to be more about the horrors of encountering a foreign culture than about the horror of war itself.

And I wonder what it must be like for veterans of these wars to walk around now, in a modern world, and see so many different faces and hear so many different languages in places that only reflected their own image back to themselves a single generation ago. The Germans I've know seem so unconnected to the SS soldiers of the movies. The many Vietnamese I've known in the past seem nothing like the crazed sadists portrayed in "Deer Hunter", or "The Killing Fields". This sense of the "foreign-ness" of other people has disintegrated visibly, even over the course of my life-time.

My point is, this experience of mass dislocation is so new. How much movement was there between cultures one hundred years ago? It was, I imagine, for the most part an exceptional experience. Now it's a common one. Although, it appears to have been an important aspect of the Roman Empire. Many different races became "Roman", and slaves from foreign lands were part of the culture.

In Israel, I saw workers on buildings who were asian. As a cook, I met Asians who spoke with Indian accents because they learned their english in India.. following the trail of economic breadcrumbs to a hoped-for prosperity, or only to escape the oppression of poverty.

In my own life, I was deeply involved, through my ex, with the orthodox Jewish community, most of whom had survived the camps only to find no families, towns, or countries to return to, and who were now deeply torn between recreating their old worlds and navigating the new one. One man came to the Holocaust center in Montreal, where I volunteered, to give a video testimony of his experience in the holocaust. His only condition for doing so was that we not allow his family to know about it until after his death. He had come to Canada, changed his name, married, had children and grandchildren, and no one even knew he was Jewish, let alone a camp survivor.

My former father-in-law was born into a Hassidic community in Czechoslovakia. He was trained as a Cantor, the person who sings the prayers at service. Because of the holocaust, he no longer practiced his faith, in fact he was openly skeptical. He lived a very secular life as a doctor. But he sang all the high holiday services at the make-shift synagogue at the hospital every year. It always seemed to me not that he was attempting to find God or faith again with his singing, but rather to bring to life the ghosts of the past life that he was cut off from so violently.

This is the world we live in today. And so how do we define ourselves after the rupture of leaving our homes? How do we define ourselves as people and citizens when we live in a foreign land and are reminded of our foreign-ness every time we speak, or eat? How do express ourselves in the different languages we learn? These questions are still a struggle for us. We know this because of the reactions that are taking place more and more around the world. The far-right christian/political movements seem on the surface like sophisticated (some not-so-sophisticated) segregation movements. Like the Spanish Inquisition, they are racial cleansing under another name.

It's remarkable to think that the world has blended so much in such a short time. But it makes one wonder how far it can go without exploding, and also what the possibilities are, the great ones, I mean, for a future.

Coetzee wrote in "Elizabeth Costelloe" that the novel is the course of human civilization and thought, one case at a time. It sounds like Brick Lane is indeed that. I will read it when time permits.