I have once again written about five blog
posts since the last one I posted, and then either summarily dismissed and
deleted them, or set them aside to be finished at some other unspecified
time. I am hoping this one will
make it through my tireless need to self-edit. I am still convinced that people, just nameless-faceless
people, troll the internet looking for ideas to steal, so I am more than a
little wary about posting anything anymore. That being said, I have decided to take back my own voice
and to stop being scared of expressing my thoughts, at least on here. Edited to say: Read this one while you can because who knows how long before I delete it.
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Chapter 1:
One of my favorite quotes from the recent
years of reading and writing are the first words of a philosophical treatise
(read as, "book") that I had the pleasure of first picking up years
ago. It was, in fact, the first
one of its kind that I picked up for my Master's course at NYU over five years
ago now. It was John Dewey's book,
Experience and Education. Several
people in my life have heard me go on and on about this book on the philosophy
of teaching, and fewer still have heard me speak about this idea I'm going to
discuss here as briefly as I can.
"Mankind likes to think in terms of
extreme opposites. It is given to
formulating its beliefs in terms of Either-Ors, between which it recognizes no
intermediate possibilities. When
forced to recognize that the extremes cannot be acted upon, [human-kind] is
still inclined to hold that they are all right in theory but that when it comes
to practical matters circumstances compel us to compromise" (p.17).
This idea that man and woman are inclined
to believe, think, act, and educate all within the concept of creating a
polarity of thought to achieve these ideals feels correct. The added stipulation that we compromise
those extreme opposites when it comes to practical matters also feels like more
than just truth, but bordering on a human fact of life. 'We will always want the best for
ourselves, but will be forced to compromise our ideals when we must deal with the
wants and needs of others.' This
is not an academic or scientific question that I am positing here, but rather
something that I feel particularly qualified to pose, a philosophical idea.
Stay with me here as I would like to build
on what Dewey has already stated.
What he was talking about was our tendency to create polarities, not
only to define what we think and feel about the world, but also who we are, how
we vote, what food/movies/books/ideas/people we like, and how we generally
treat ourselves and others. The
first step in discussing this issue is by recognizing that Dewey's statement
can be taken as truth. This is
most easily exemplified by the very existence of politicians. If one politician states that they are
(for example) against overly taxing people who make more than a certain amount
of money, there is an immediate (human) response in voters to either agree or
disagree with that idea. By
expressing a preference, the politician has created a polarity. In fact, I could probably posit that
without polarity, politics (and newspapers) would not even exist, but that is
an entirely different discussion.
The strange reality of that situation (or
any) is that the answer to that question, "Should we tax people according
to their income?" is never so binary as saying, "I agree" or
"I disagree," though the world as we know it has come to believe it
so. Sometimes we forget that we
are dealing with human beings, who are as complex in thought as we ourselves
have been known to be from time to time.
It is not a binary decision that has to be made, (and here is where I
deviate from my mentor, Dewey,) it is also not degrees of compromise that we
must consider as our alternatives to thinking decisions must be made one way or
the other. Though humankind "is
given to formulating its beliefs in terms of Either-Ors", the mechanics of
thought are not as two or even one-dimensional as believing one answer is the
complete opposite of another.
Rather, think of the decisions that are expected of you on a daily basis
as more organic than the choices that are made up or given to you by those
roles or people in life that are served by creating polarities (politics, news,
religion, interior design, etc.).
Put simply, and in parlance to those that might one day read this blog,
think of these decisions as items on the menu at Starbucks. One decision does not discount the
validity or undo the decision made at another time or by another person. These decisions you make at Starbucks
(1-pump, half-caf, extra-shot, grande skinny vanilla mocha with a scoop of
matcha) are as personal to you as your politics should be, your taxes should
be, and your opinions on life should be.
We forget that the people we meet in life are as nuanced in their
emotional maturity as we are. That
getting turned down for that job seemed like a binary decision on the part of
that guy in the interview, but it was (and always will be) far more complicated
a situation than just, "he didn't like you" or "the guy they
hired was best friends with the CEO", even though popular fiction movies
and news stories would have you believe it so.
Chapter 2:
The reason I have been thinking about this
is not because I want to try and make life's simple decisions (i.e. to go to
the bathroom or wait for the next rest stop) more and more complicated. It is because I believe that I can be
better in recognizing those polarities and ridding my life of thinking about
them in that way. The most
poignant and recognized polarities in my world these days are racism and sexism. This is not because I identify or know
anyone that identifies as a racist or a sexist (in fact, I'm trying to picture
an even moderately intelligent human being walking around and saying to folks,
"Hi I am a sexist/racist" and I can't imagine who that would be). Rather, I know LOTS of people who have
identified racist or sexist tendencies in other people. The 'conversation' usually begins with
the words, "Everyone is saying..." or "I'm tired of hearing
that..." or "People say...", or something that amounts to the
speaker being on one side of their argument and 'people' being on the other
side. Republicans and Democrats
have been using this tactic for as long as there has been a reporter there to
record it. The reason that this is
important at all, is that this kind of thinking has even begun to affect the
way that modern artwork is portrayed and interpreted.
Most recently, a twitter-hashtag cropped up
on my Facebook feed called #StarringJohnCho. The artist, William Yu, used an incredibly intelligent
manner of addressing an issue of racism in the entertainment industry, and the
artwork used one of my favorite actors as the subject of many movie poster
mash-ups (John Cho - whose work includes Go On and Selfie, two tragically named
yet brilliantly written and acted short-lived TV shows of the past ten
years.) John Cho in a picture that
replaces Matt Damon's face with his as the star of "The Martian" was
amongst the number of mash-ups I saw there. It was interesting and even at times thought-provoking.
"I'm tired of hearing from people that
they can't 'see' an Asian American actor playing the romantic lead or the hero,
so I created #StarringJohnCho to literally show you," he said."
See the link here.
He's not wrong and he may have indeed heard
from many people on the internet, in person, over the phone, or by smoke signal
that some person or another cannot physically or metaphysically see an
Asian-American actor as a romantic lead.
In the circle of people this twitter-author may keep to, there might even
be a thousand comments to his website agreeing or disagreeing with this idea.
Not the artwork, neither the obvious
message that has been handed to us, nor even the blatant problem in the
entertainment industry that this artwork addresses has tried to polarize our
thoughts. In fact, the mash-up of
these photos allows my imagination to run with ideas of cultural plurality on
the level of Star Trek meets Star Wars (and all of the races, cultures, and
creeds that might introduce.) It
is the artist, and the BBC reporter that wrote about it, who have provided us
not only with the problem that we as human beings face, but also that which so
many of didn't even know we craved: the answer. ("Here is John Cho. An Asian-American actor. He looks like a leading man, doesn't he? Cast him as a
leading man and all will be *maybe* forgiven.") This artist and his reporter are two pieces to this one
example, and yet there is no end to the polarities we face on a day-to-day
basis.
Chapter 3:
On some level or another I believe that at
one point in my life I have thought these things:
I believe that I must fight racism, because
I have been told that it is form of hatred.
I must fight sexism, because that too, is
hatred incarnate.
I must identify those that practice racism
and sexism and work to banish them from our world.
I thought I'd address these two as
representative of these kinds of polarities in our day-to-day lives as there
are a few things that must be noted about racism and sexism.
Despite our world history, where sexism and
racism have been very nearly palpable movements in political and cultural
circles (and still are today in some African and Middle Eastern cultures, from
what I understand), these are not ideas based solely on hate (though some would
like to believe it so, because they would like to be thought of as fighting on
the side of "love").
Sexism and racism are truly the weapons of those that wish to divide our
understanding of the world into two camps. It is the human condition to try and boil down our
understanding of other people's motives into right and wrong, good and bad, up
and down, left and not-left, and to be or not to be... though it is easy to do
so, this can not and should not be the only question left to us: which side do
we fall on?
There are many old sayings that continue to
segregate, polarize, and partition our ideas, and my favorite is: "You
gotta pick a side," or "There are two sides to every
story." What I will begin to
do in my life is no longer accept the premise of these statements. I have to stop thinking of the world in
terms of black and white, or shades of grey as I compromise between two
arbitrary, so-called opposites. I
must make my thinking reflect who I am as a person: complicated, muddled,
plural-thinking, and three dimensional.
There are always more than two sides to any argument and if I can't find
a third or fourth answer to some fairly simple questions I must begin to refuse
the premise of the argument and ask a different question of myself. Sometimes I hear people quoting Hamlet
as if it were some kind of gospel, as if "to be or not to be" were
actually a question, or indeed the only question that needed answering, when
there is so much more to life than asking and answering queries of whether or not
life should be lived at all. I
believe Shakespeare wrote it with a suicidal/homicidal, clinically depressed
Prince of Denmark in mind, so if you fit that description, well, your life has
already be kind of decided for you now hasn't it? What's the point of it all?
To be, or not to be? That is the question—
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous
fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And, by opposing, end them? To die, to
sleep—
No more—and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache and the thousand natural
shocks
That flesh is heir to—’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished! To die, to sleep.
To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s
the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may
come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. -- Hamlet (III.i.57-69)
Year 4, Day 231 -- Words Written: 11,259
(for this chapter).
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