One of my abusive father's constant lines was that he was so cruel because he was preparing me for the world "out there." But when I got to the world out there, it turned out to be very giving and generous toward me.
That's especially been the case since I developed massive food allergies. I'm allergic to fruit, mold, and corn. I'm especially allergic to corn which works to suppress my respiratory system. I start reacting if I even smell microwave popcorn. The bad thing is that corn syrup and corn starch are in used as sweeteners in most processed foods. As a result, I have to be very careful with my diet when I go out to eat.
At the same time, the people who have hosted Mrs. RSI and me for dinner have always bent over backwards to be accommodating to my allergies. In fact, people in Morehead and Philadelphia are so unfailingly generous about my allergies that I'm usually embarrassed by their solicitousness.
Last night, I had dinner at the home of some long time friends in Philadelphia. The hostess asked me what I could eat and not eat a couple of times in advance and her concern for my health and sense of ease was heartwarming. A cynic might object that these are my friends, but I find that the same is the case at university events, restaurants, and in the homes of acquaintances and strangers.
Most of us have a keen awareness of the crime, dishonesty, and conflict in the world. But I see the other side all the time and am beginning to wonder if we don't grossly underestimate the weight of consideration, "niceness," friendship, and love in our lives.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
5 comments:
Ah, sorry to hear about your father. No doubt that helps explain the dispute we were having at my place. If you're seeing his face when I talk about "Dangerous old men," I can understand why you'd have an almost instinctive objection.
Kindness is indeed vastly underestimated in its import; you can't easily even imagine the effect of a kind act on a stranger. It may mean nothing, or it may change their life, and you'll never know.
I've tried to explain the matter again, from first principles, in terms that should be meaningful to an educator such as yourself. For what it's worth, kindness is something I believe in too.
Genuine thanks for your concern, but that's not the case. Abusive people are weak and thus not dangerous in your way. I realized that my father was a weak person as early as my college years.
Moreover, I consider my abusive background as a gift that's been an enormous benefit in my work as a college teacher. When I encounter students who are struggling (and I encounter many such students), I generally see them from a position of empathy because I've struggled with issues as difficult as many of theirs.
I don't find your "dangerous old man" position objectionable per se. I have a tough time working with college guys and I know there's an issue there. Likewise, I think much of the question is one of how to be "authoritative" as you say. I just think that the way you frame these issues in terms of physical training, the military, and firearms is overly narrow and too easily associated with male supremacy, homophobia, and a regressive kind of white Southernism.
"Authoritative" is not quite what I'm after. What I said was that the only real authority is that which is freely granted -- that you have to have their permission to lead them, to teach them, to change them. What I'm talking about is how to be the kind of man they will want to follow.
That kind of allegiance has to be won. It has to be won, not on our preferred terms, but on the terms of the young and dangerous men you want to convince. It's not that I'm trying to be narrow; it's that this is the coin that they will accept. The choice is theirs, not ours.
I was one of those young men, once. Now, as a husband and father, I have a very deep sense of gratitude for the men who were strong enough to impress me, and kind enough to teach an arrogant, swaggering child how to be a man who could earn the respect he desired.
The United States Marine Corps' university at Quantico captures the sense in its motto: Ductus Exemplo. It's not just that you lead by example; it's that the example you set earns you the power to command. Ductus, in the Latin, speaks especially to leadership of men in defense of society: it was the title, Dux Bellorum, that some historians believe would have been borne by the figure that myth later came to call King Arthur. It is also the root of the noble rank of Duke, which arose out of the band of fighting men who rode with the king (the comitatus).
So, if it is "easily associated" with the things you mention, it is also properly associated with some truly excellent things. It's worth looking beyond the easy associations of modern American culture, in this as in other matters.
It's a model that was inspiring to many poets and great writers who were trying to express high and fine ideas about love and justice and what the institutions of government -- in those days, kings and knighthood -- were properly about. This is true not only for the Western cultures, but for the Korean master I mentioned; and not only him, but for other Eastern traditions in China and Japan.
In every case, the ideal is one of trying to establish the environment for justice and harmony to exist in this world. It's a dangerous world, and no part of it more dangerous than we ourselves.
Yet you can't wish the bad parts away; they will not go. The young men of the next generation will be just as dangerous and potentially violent as the current ones, as the past ones. These ideals and poems I speak of, they always end with the fall -- the space for justice that is created and defended can only last a while, before the nature of the world sweeps it away again (cf. the death of Arthur in Malory with the final scene in the Beowulf, and with the periods in the Odyssey when Odysseus is absent from Ithaca).
That may very well be the best that can be expected. I realize there are other ideals people have had, and tried, for creating a social contract that doesn't finally lay on violence. I have heard that they work, conditionally: a monastery or a community of Quakers can survive and flourish, so long as they live within a kingdom or a nation that will defend them and protect their rights. Within the monastery walls, they have a beautiful way of living, and the walls need no guards; but beyond those walls must be other walls that are guarded in earnest.
Out of that necessity, though, we have made something better than just survival. We've made poems and songs, ideals and epics, and have inspired the young men of generations to learn to use their power in the service of others. They learn to serve, and become dependable sources of strength. In becoming that, they have learned how to earn the love and gratitude of their community, of the women with whom they make families, and -- if they learn the lessons well -- of the children they raise to follow them.
That is, I think, a beautiful thing as well. It is the way in which the hollow longing and anger of those young men is transformed into the ability to both give and receive genuine love. It creates a place in which Quakers and communes and monasteries can flourish, so that -- at least somewhere in this world -- there is true peace for those who wish to seek it.
It is an ideal, I say; of course, in practice, things don't work out as perfectly as the ideal suggests is possible. But that is the nature of ideals. They give you something to aspire to. If they lack the power to perfect the world, they have the power to improve it, at least for a time, in a place, while we live. After us, the fall -- unless, that is, we have raised others who can defend the gains for the space of their lives also.
We're talking about the same thing. When I saw "authoritative," I also mean "the only real authority is that which is freely granted -- that you have to have their permission to lead them, to teach them, to change them."
I think you would have much better luck with this if you started making analogies between the military training you revere and other kinds of teaching relationships within "modern American society."
As someone who teaches three sections of classical literature every term, I have no objection to thinking through the issues of classical literature in relation to our current cultural conundrums.
However, as long as you're not thinking through these issues in relation to the unique situation of modern America, you're going to be far off the mark. All the models to which you refer are meant for intensely hierarchical societies (and in the case of your King Arthur reference, a pitifully weak and disorganized hierarchical society as Catholic Europe was through the 1300's).
The United States is a unique and confusing kind of society. It's an intensely hierarchical society in which there is no legitimate reference to blood and land to justify those hierarchies. The U. S. is also an intensely hierarchical society in which subordinate groups like blacks, gay people, immigrant groups, and women have all made partial good to some degree on their claims to equal status. Because the subordinate groups have all made only partial good on their claims, everybody has to figure out the niceties of their own status and the status of others as they go along. We're not in medieval England anymore.
I'm not totally unsympathetic with what you're saying, but I can't see how much good your approach is going to do if you don't correlate your ethic of authority with the social realities of "modern America." That's the real world that young men are going to have to live in.
Pardon me; I don't mean to suggest that there is no correlation to modern American society. I only expounded on the historical and literary connections to help underline that the "easy associations" that occur to an early 21st-century American are not the only proper ones.
As I said above, this is something I was taught by living men, most especially my grandfather. He was the grandson of a man who had fought the early KKK in the wake of the Civil War, and personally prevented lynchings with a repeating rifle; he was the son of a man whose life had been saved by an older black man who warned him of an ambush, and pressed a revolver into his hand.
My grandfather was a friend to Knoxville's black community during the tense Civil Rights period. I remember his story about attending the funeral of one of his friends from that community, in a part of town that was at that point quite dangerous for a white man to travel. Yet he took his family, my father and uncle and my grandmother, and they went and paid due respect. The ability to defend themselves was also defending the capacity of people of good heart to reach out to each other, in spite of the opinions of hateful men on both sides.
And they were on both sides. Knoxville saw a school blown up by what we would today call terrorists, rather than be integrated; my uncle, in spite of the friendship I mention, had to defend the family's service station with a .38 against some young black thugs who tried to attack it during the tense period. No one was hurt -- they withdrew at the sight of his firearm and his obvious expertise with it (he was USAF Security Police in Korea) -- but it's a good example of the positive use of arms to secure a common peace.
You've probably heard of former Georgia governor Lester Maddox, who passed out axe handles to patrons of his restaurant to drive off blacks who should try to eat there. You won't have heard of one of my father's friends, however, who in the same period in Atlanta used to go eat at a then-prominent barbecue joint in the black community. The owner would literally draw a revolver and warn the crowd off when my father's friend walked in -- and thereby, the link between this man and another man was defended.
The "easy associations" are only part of the story. Good people who will defend each other, and stand up to protect a common peace, have at times been all that has defended a space for good men. There have been times when the law was not on their side -- as it was not when Lester Maddox was governor, or when one of the seven proto-KKK men my great-great grandfather killed was also a deputy.
American society, as you say, has its own special nature. I think the general principles hold up well, however, from one society to another. That is why you find them at work in places as divergent as China and England; and in the mouths of men as diverse as a Korean master, and my grandfather.
Of course there have also been unjust men, violent and dangerous, in all of those places. That is another universal constant in human societies. It seems to me, though, that only cements the need for good men to be willing and also able to defend justice in society, and to have not only the right but also the tools to do so.
Post a Comment