Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 365

Quote For The Day II

 

“Once I became official to my teammates, I knew who I was. I knew that I was gay. And I knew that I was Michael Sam, who’s a Mizzou football player who happens to be gay. I was so proud of myself and I just didn’t care who knew. If someone on the street would have asked me, ‘Hey, Mike, I heard you were gay. Is that true?’ I would have said yes. But no one asked. I guess they don’t want to ask a 6-3, 260-pound defensive lineman if he was gay or not,” – Michael Sam, New York Times. There’s a great video interview with him here.

What’s so encouraging here is not just that he’s African-American but that he was already out among his team-mates. So there’s no shock in the team, and what seems like a really adjusted, virtually normal life. He’s also really good – and yes, I infer that solely from the fact that the AP named him their SEC Defensive Player of the Year.

This is the next gay generation. You cannot stop their self-esteem. And you cannot pigeon-hole them into any category. You just have to get out the way.

(Photo: Michael Sam #52 of the Missouri Tigers celebrates with fans following a game against the Ole Miss Rebels at Vaught-Hemingway Stadium on November 23, 2013 in Oxford, Mississippi. Missouri defeated Ole Miss 24-10. By Stacy Revere/Getty Images.)

A Poem For Sunday

From “Jail Poems” by Bob Kaufman (1925-1986):

I am sitting in a cell with a view of evil parallels,

Waiting thunder to splinter me into a thousand me’s.

It is not enough to be in one cage with one self;

I want to sit opposite every prisoner in every hole.

Doors roll and bang, every slam a finality, bang!

The junkie disappeared into a red noise, stoning out his hell.

The odored wino congratulates himself on not smoking,

Fingerprints left lying on black inky gravestones,

Noises of pain seeping through steel walls crashing

Reach my own hurt. I become part of someone forever.

Wild accents of criminals are sweeter to me than hum of cops,

Busy battening down hatches of human souls; cargo

Destined for ports of accusations, harbors of guilt.

What do policemen eat, Socrates, still prisoner, old one?

(Reprinted from Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry, edited by Charles Henry Rowell © 2013 by Charles Henry Rowell. Used by kind permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation. Photo of Kaufman in San Francisco, circa the 1950s, via the City Lights blog)

Correction Of The Day

“An earlier version of this article used an incorrect term for an experiment in which women sniff the unwashed T-shirts of men. Selecting the T-shirts of men with genes markedly different from their own is not a form of assortative mating, which is the choosing of similar genes, not different ones,” - New York Times.

So This Is How The Cold War Ends

They have the gay men’s chorus in Russia?

Overdosing On Technology

Tim Wu describes the Oji-Cree, “a people, numbering about thirty thousand, who inhabit a cold and desolate land roughly the size of Germany.” Though the Oji-Cree lived healthful and relatively and tech-free lives until the 1960s, they have since rapidly adapted to modern advances like electricity:

[I]n the main, the Oji-Cree’s story is not a happy one. Since the arrival of new technologies, the population has suffered a massive increase in morbid obesity, heart disease, and Type 2 diabetes. Social problems are rampant: idleness, alcoholism, drug addiction, and suicide have reached some of the highest levels on earth. Diabetes, in particular, has become so common (affecting forty per cent of the population) that researchers think that many children, after exposure in the womb, are born with an increased predisposition to the disease. Childhood obesity is widespread, and ten-year-olds sometimes appear middle-aged. Recently, the Chief of a small Oji-Cree community estimated that half of his adult population was addicted to OxyContin or other painkillers.

Technology is not the only cause of these changes, but scientists have made clear that it is a driving factor. In previous times, the Oji-Cree lifestyle required daily workouts that rivalled those of a professional athlete. “In the early 20th century,” writes one researcher, “walking up to 100 km/day was not uncommon.” But those days are over, replaced by modern comforts. Despite the introduction of modern medicine, the health outcomes of the Oji-Cree have declined in ways that will not be easy to reverse. The Oji-Cree are literally being killed by technological advances.

Finding Peace In Prison

Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee’s short documentary “Path of Freedom,” above, shows us how inmates at the John J. Moran Prison in Rhode Island have embraced meditation. Producer Dorothée Royal-Hedinger wrote about what she saw while filming behind bars:

The hour-long meditation class was a place many prisoners felt they could be themselves. Their mindfulness practice, they stressed, was not an escape, but rather a tool that helped them come to terms with the reality of their situation. One prisoner explained, “Once you come to prison, your life keeps tumbling and tumbling and it’s like a never-ending wall that won’t stop building…unless you find a way to get over that wall, or at least in front of it.”

The meditation course gives the prisoners the space to confront their guilt, remorse, grief, and anger; it also opens up the possibilities of making positive choices, no matter how small. As one prisoner expressed, “Someone has given us an opportunity to meditate and connect ourselves. That’s golden.”

(Hat tip: Paul Rosenfeld)

Wired To Be Immoral?

Jason Brennan ponders the limits of morality:

My worry here is that ought implies can, and it may well be that people can’t bring themselves to do certain things. Agency isn’t all or nothing. Just as some people might compulsively engage in certain behaviors that they cannot control, so many of us might have an equivalent inability to do certain things that morality might otherwise require. It’s not just that we are unwilling to these things, but that we are unable to be willing to do these things.

Of course, people are different. [Philosopher] Peter Singer is willing to give more to charity (not as much as he says he should, though) than most people, including me. But that doesn’t show that everyone could give as much as Singer. Everyone’s psychology is a bit different. Perhaps Singer is a few standard deviations to the right of the curve when it comes to psychological ability to give to others. Perhaps some other people quite literally cannot will to give. For them to give 50% of their income to charity is physically impossible, because their brains just don’t work that way. You might as well ask them to jump to the moon.

Roth’s Rejection Of Religion

In an interview, Phillip Roth explains why he refuses to label himself an “American-Jewish writer”:

[Q]: Many consider you the preeminent Jewish American writer. You told one interviewer, however, “The epithet ‘American Jewish writer’ has no meaning for me. If I’m not an American, I’m nothing.” You seem to be so much both. Can you say a little more about your rejection of that description?

[A]: ”An American-Jewish writer” is an inaccurate if not also a sentimental description, and entirely misses the point. The novelist’s obsession, moment by moment, is with language: finding the right next word. For me, as for Cheever, DeLillo, Erdrich, Oates, Stone, Styron and Updike, the right next word is an American-English word. I flow or I don’t flow in American English. I get it right or I get it wrong in American English. Even if I wrote in Hebrew or Yiddish I would not be a Jewish writer. I would be a Hebrew writer or a Yiddish writer. … If I don’t measure up as an American writer, at least leave me to my delusion.

“Our Unlived Lives”

Ethan Richardson reviews Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life by Adam Phillips:

Missing Out is about classic, fork-in-the-road questions of identity. When Robert Frost took “the road less traveled” and Jesus called us through the “narrow gate,” Phillips looks back at the roads untraveled, at what we missed, and describes human identity as a constant looking back upon the lives we have chosen not to live–or the lives that we have failed to live–or the lives that, much to our frustration, have always eluded us. For Phillips, we are as much a measure of the selves we aren’t as the self we happen to be facing in the mirror today. What about the one we used to love, or the one we picture ourselves loving someday? What about the job we longed for and never got? Or the job we got, but it could be in ten years? As he says, “We share our lives with the people we have failed to be.”

A quote from Phillips’s introduction:

There is always what will turn out to be the life we led, and the life that accompanied it, the parallel life (or lives) that never actually happened, that we lived in our minds, the wished-for life (or lives):

the risks untaken and the opportunities avoided or unprovided. We refer to them as our unlived lives because somewhere we believe that they were open to us; but for some reason–and we might spend a great deal of our lived lives trying to find and give the reason–they were not possible. And what was not possible all too easily becomes the story of our lives. Indeed, our lived lives might become a protracted mourning for, or an endless tantrum about, the lives we were unable to live. But the exemptions we suffer, whether forced or chosen, make us who we are. As we know more now than ever before about the kinds of lives it is possible to live–and affluence has allowed more people than ever before to think of their lives in terms of choices and options–we are always haunted by the myth of our potential, of what we might have it in ourselves to be or do. So when we are not thinking, like the characters in Randall Jarrell’s poem, that “The ways we miss our lives is life,” we are grieving or regretting or resenting our failure to be ourselves as we imagine we could be.

The Creativity Of Copycats

Commenting on Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, Popova considers the composer’s tendency to plagiarize from soloists in his orchestra “without credit, creative or financial, to the originators”:

[Music writer and historian Stanley] Dance called him “the greatest innovator in his field, and yet paradoxically a conservative, one who built new things on the best of the old.” It was, no doubt, a compliment on the mastery with which Ellington built on the legacy of jazz, not a dig on his unabashed creative borrowing that bled into plagiarism. And therein lies another eternal human paradox that Ellington embodied: Is it possible to be both a plagiarist and an innovator? Ellington lived the answer with remarkable aplomb.

But the real question, of course, isn’t whether creativity is combinatorial and based on the assemblage of existing materials — it is. What Ellington did was simply follow the fundamental impetus of the creative spirit to combine and recombine old ideas into new ones. How he did it, however, was a failure of creative integrity. Attribution matters, however high up the genius food chain one may be.

Previous Dish on Ellington here and here.