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garbandier · 7 years ago

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Child Please: Concerning the Pyszczyk Maneuver

“Human memory is like a scribe laboriously setting down letters while his left hand erases the text of the past. Every generation knocks together its own apocalypse and utopia and, confident in its own powers, believes its utopia and apocalypse will come off exceptionally well, unlike any other, will be final.” —Zbigniew Herbert, “Passo Romano.” The Collected Prose: 1948-1998 (pp. 651-652). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

The mind, like the human face, is a pebble on which the stream of time exerts tremendous powers of revision and change. I love creeks and the places that nourish them. Few occupations delight me more than stopping in some leafy cloister to consider the subtle arts by which time’s whimsy alters the rocks in a stream. In wheeling, whirling courses of silt and sediment, in teeming eddies and gurgling little pockets, the pebbles in the stream are constantly prodded and perused, tested and turned, worked on and prised and pushed by the patient fingers of the water. Heavy rocks and sunken logs and broken branches cluttering the stream are massaged by detritus and flowing sediment and whatever else the churning waters may choose to marshal as a persuasive tool. The stream’s hands exert their influence quietly beneath a calm surface glazed with floating leaves and spidery skimmers. The water might spend a hundred years smoothing a single stone. Or instantly the stream might give in to greed and gorge itself on a chunk of earth from an overhanging bank, or snap a mossy log and ferry it to some new position.

Eventually, the artistic collaboration between time and water rearranges the small stream-things and the large stream-things, and what emerges is a new pattern of movement, a slightly new direction for the whole stream. The water’s work changes the rocks, but the story does not stop there: the changed rocks change the stream in turn; alterations in the stony bed change the course of the stream itself. The new course changes the rocks in new ways, and so forth.

The human mind is altered by time, but time itself is baptized by contact with the imagination. The imagination amplifies how we experience the past: we can gratefully imagine how things could have turned out much worse than they did. Conversely, we can choose to torment ourselves with the power to imagine how much better life could have been. But the imagination can also make the future seem inhabitable. The person for whom the future holds no imaginable significance is likely to enjoy a less meaningful present.

As someone who wrestles with depression, I have real sympathy for anyone who considers the future likely to be desolate and uninhabitable. Nor am I surprised when bleak assumptions lead to bleak opinions and bleak paintings. But I must try to cast a critical eye on such assumptions when they arise in my own mind. And when bleak surveys of the future form the basis for drastic calls to action, I wonder exactly how did it happen, this shriveling of the imagination, this inability (in the words of poet Dana Gioia) to “dream of a future so fitting and so just / that our desire will bring it into being.”

What follows are some scattered thoughts on a recent opinion piece by Kristen Pyszczyk positing an ecological mandate to procreate less.

Pyszczyk takes as her starting point the announcement by Fixer Upper stars Chip and Joanna Gaines that they are expecting their fifth child. Pyszczyk notes an online backlash against this announcement, and says she was surprised:

Not because I disagree with their critics, who admonished the couple for having too many kids, but rather because it's a sentiment so seldom heard in a society that generally celebrates procreation with almost militant cheerfulness.

I am amazed by Pyszczyk’s apparent struggle to understand why people celebrate procreation so much. Complaining about some taboo against “criticizing parents for having too many kids” would be like Westboro Baptist Church members grousing about a taboo against protesting military funerals. Society has no need for taboos against notions that can only bubble up in the mind of someone predisposed to extreme zealotry. How pleasant it is to imagine that disagreements stem from the irrationality of others. If one’s position meets widespread unpopularity because of a “taboo”, an “almost militant” sentiment, or an “uncritical” contagion, then surely one is excused from the risky task of scrutinizing one’s own motives too closely.

While having a child or five is a very personal choice, it's also a choice that affects everyone who inhabits our planet. So while many people might find the backlash unwarranted, it's actually a conversation we need to have in order to challenge our uncritical acceptance of the life-fulfillment-through-procreation story.

Pyszczyk employs the term “conversation” three times in this piece, but she uses it as a euphemism for whatever is the opposite of conversation. She seems to have no interest in persuading anyone through dialogue. She advocates calling people out for having lots of kids and shaming them into having fewer kids (henceforth will I refer to this as the Pyszczk Maneuver). Oh, I don’t know; a conversation centering on being shamed and called out just does not appeal much to me.

Procreation is becoming a global public health concern, rather than a personal decision. So when people do irresponsible things like having five children, we absolutely need to be calling them out.

The only noteworthy ecological effect of “calling out” parents with lots of kids as “irresponsible” would be to befoul the atmosphere by exposing one’s own toxic asininity.

Someone who might be inclined to have children, yet who chooses not to in order to help the earth, has my admiration for incurring so real a cost by acting in a principled way. That person also has a measure of my sadness, because I imagine the path they choose to walk may be very lonely at times. I say all this as I walk my own lonely path in life.

Pyszczyk writes:

Population control is a fraught topic, and carries with it associations with eugenics and other nasty historical events. But we still need to talk about it, and people who reacted strongly to the Gaines' pregnancy announcement know this on some level. It's not an exaggeration to say that the survival of our species depends on it.

Population control is not merely associated with “nasty historical events” like eugenics; population control was the animating principle for the perpetrators of those atrocities. Indeed, the history of population control alarmism is a long train of abuse and hubristic overreach. Today’s theories remain tainted (inescapably, to my mind) by the heinous stank of odious and cruel social projects like eugenics and one-child policies, not to mention the spectacularly failed predictions of famine and devastation made by the likes of Thomas Malthus, Paul Ehrlich, and others.

By no means should past abuses and quackpot tendencies invalidate concerns about humanity’s impact on the natural world. Quite the contrary. Likewise, just because every so often some kook hauls himself out of a dank pit and decides to predict the date of Doomsday in the name of the Lord, his kookery has exactly zero bearing on the truth claims of Christianity.

I am troubled by the way Pyszczk glosses over eugenicist and racist aspects of population theory. She claims that “the survival of our species depends on” population control. If the situation is that dire, if [cue cinematic music] the fate of humanity is at stake, then what possible justification can there be for not forcing people to procreate less or physically winnowing the population? If a certain number of babies truly is too heavy a burden for the earth to bear, then would not the ruling authorities actually have a moral obligation to forcibly reduce the population? I do not see how a person’s choice matters if humanity truly hangs in the balance.

The Pyszczk Maneuver will never persuade anyone who is not already amenable to its logic. Its core problems are ethical and evidential, but the message of the Pyszczk Maneuver also faces an impossibly steep public relations battle. Hectoring an extremely well-liked celebrity couple for having a baby seems like a fine hill to die upon.

I see no way to argue for a reduction in people without inviting an array of half-sarcastic replies like “which people?” and “you first.” To argue in any respect for “fewer people” is to first plant in my imagination the seed of a person’s existence. That hypothetical person acquires real weight in my mind, and for me to then wipe that person out of existence would be participation in a hate crime against otherness.

“Now,” Pyszczk writes, “as a feminist, I tend to oppose any cultural conversation that involves telling a woman what to do with her body.” Pyszczk then constructs an elaborate rationale for why she feels comfortable telling other women to have fewer children. Such moral contradictions will arise in our wacky hyper-modern world, where people still want the narrative satisfaction of eschatological meaning traditionally provided by religion, but not the burden of having to be traditionally religious in respectable society. So one cobbles together one’s own sources of narrative meaning. When one’s personal vision of Utopia fails to materialize, the next step is to seek the consolations of Apocalypse. Some amount of pricking and poking seems inevitable when you inhabit an epistemological nest of your own making, cobbled together with any contradictory twigs and scraps you could gather. Pyszczk senses two sides of her values coming into conflict and cannot really reconcile them.

People crave justice. They see nature ravaged and tortured under rack and screw and forced to give unreliable testimony, and so where nature cannot speak the truth, people rightly cry out for justice on her behalf. I lament all plundering and exploitation of the earth and its creatures, and I question my preference for ways of living that insulate me from the claims of nature and leave me blind to the goodness and sheer fragility of natural life. I affirm the need to steward and protect ecological resources. But the Pyszczk Maneuver seems obviously counterproductive. I can scarcely imagine a more efficient way of alienating people against the environment than by shaming them for their desire for children, all on the basis of extremely flimsy speculation. And I do not see any way to argue for an ecological mandate to have fewer kids without shaming people who have or want to have lots of kids.

Concerns about ecological justice must be grounded in humility, given the overwhelming complexity of being. “All the efforts of the human mind cannot exhaust the essence of a single fly,” declared Thomas Aquinas over seven centuries ago. The more attention I pay to the small things in my midst, the more voluminous they become and the more they absorb me. The more I look at a thing, the more substantial thingness it seems to possess.

Think about the early days of microscopes. Can you imagine how wonderful it must have been for a man of learning to peer through a microscope for the first time and see the world with a whole new perspective? What a rush of blood to the brain; what intellectual vertigo it must have been. The seventeenth-century poet and mystic Thomas Traherne looked at a common housefly under the glass and what he found was a marvel beyond marvels:

The Creation of Insects affords us a Clear Mirror of Almighty Power, and Infinite Wisdom with a Prospect likewise of Transcendent Goodness. Had but one of those Curious and High Stomached flies, been Created, whose Burnisht, and Resplendent Bodies are like Orient Gold, or Polisht Steel; whose Wings Are So Strong, and Whose Head so Crowned with an Imperial Tuff, which we often see Enthroned upon a Leaf, having a pavement of living Emrauld beneath its feet, their contemplating all the World…the Infinit Workmanship about his Body the Marvellous Consistence of his Lims, the most neat and Exquisit Distinction of his Joynts, the Subtile and Imperceptible Ducture of his Nerves, and Endowments of his Tongue, and Ears, and Eyes, and Nostrils; the stupendious union of his Soul and Body, the Exact and Curious Symmetry of all his Parts, the feeling of his feet and the swiftness of his Wings, the Vivacity of his quick and active Power...

Life overpowers me with plenitude. Perhaps Pyszczk and I simply inhabit mental worlds too radically different to be bridged: while I stroll down to the neighbor’s barn behind my house, she aspires to the rings of Saturn. The small world of a backyard, a neighborhood, a sloping hill, a patch of woodland—to me these are places replete with possibility and mystery. Just yesterday my little world was transformed with snow, and the tree outside my window filled up with cardinals. I spent hours watching dozens of fat red males and dappled gray-brown females bustle and perch and fuss and feed.

I could not say for sure how moving a handful of pebbles from one spot to another might affect the course of a flowing stream; what, then, is there to say to those who would not blush at reducing human life to carbon footprints and doling out blithe judgments on which person’s future should or should not be blotted out? What algorithm or cost-benefit analysis or predictive model can possibly account for the ripples in time that may emanate from a single human life, let alone whole groups of people? What wretched slide into cultural glaciation must the people of Iceland undergo in order to systematically annihilate people with Down Syndrome through abortion? You may bend the direction of the stream to your will; you may change the way the water moves by rearranging the rocks and the sand and the dirt; but you cannot account for the way the stream will change you in return.

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topmixtrends · 7 years ago

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TEMPTED TO SKIP OVER anything to do with aging? You’re not alone. Few respectable philosophers have tackled the topic since Cicero in 45 BCE. So hats off to eminent scholars Martha C. Nussbaum and Saul Levmore for stepping into the breach. Good news for the extra-averse: the authors are quick to assure us that their new book, Aging Thoughtfully: Conversations about Retirement, Romance, Wrinkles, and Regret, “is certainly not about dying, gracefully or otherwise.”

The book’s form was inspired by Cicero’s De Senectute (On Aging), a conversation between the philosopher and his best friend, Atticus, when both were in their 60s. In Aging Thoughtfully, eight pairs of essays tackle various aspects of later life, from the nature of friendship and family relationships to the loss of physical and mental control. Drawing on high culture and low, the authors make no attempt to be definitive or detached. Nussbaum, a renowned philosopher, focuses on issues of ethics and emotional life, while Levmore, a lawyer-economist, takes a more pragmatic tack.

Ancient Greeks and Romans could expect to live to around 35, compared to almost 79 for Americans today. Our grandchildren may well become centenarians. This is new ground, culturally and biologically. Roles, institutions, and attitudes have yet to catch up, so it behooves us to come out of our don’t-want-to-think-about-it foxholes, reflect on the terrain ahead, and help to shape it. To that end, this erudite and entertaining book offers an abundance of guidance. Few of us, as the authors point out, feel comfortable talking about how to pass on property to our children, or how our bodies are changing, or how we hope to be remembered. Aging Thoughtfully ventures deliberately into such awkward terrain.

The book tackles a wide range of topics: bequests, retirement, plastic surgery, philanthropy, and May-December romance, among others. “We have tried to bring fresh approaches to these and other subjects,” the authors write, “to show that thinking and arguing about them is not only practical, but also one of the great pleasures of aging.” It is, indeed, because aging is living, and good conversation is one of life’s delights. Thinking about aging also makes good sense: the more we know about the process, the less terror it holds, and the better prepared we are for the old age we want.

Some chapters consist of Levmore responding to Nussbaum, or vice versa. Sometimes the two square off, as in the chapter on retirement policy. Levmore makes a persuasive case for reinstating a mandatory retirement age, which he argues could reduce rather than encourage discrimination against older workers. Nussbaum counters fiercely, calling mandatory retirement “one of the great moral evils of our times” and citing Mill’s justification for ending discrimination against women: “namely, the advantage of basing central social institutions ‘on justice rather than injustice.’”

As Nussbaum notes, it took a revolution to raise consciousness about the effects of sexism on women’s lives. When it comes to ageism, that revolution is only now gathering steam, so perhaps it’s unfair to critique the authors for not fully reckoning with their own negative — largely unconscious — feelings about age and aging. Age prejudice affects us all, of course, but if we are to age not just thoughtfully but as equal citizens to the end, we must move beyond our ingrained biases. As they grapple with the meanings of our march through life, Nussbaum and Levmore make clear how far we still have to go.

Part of the problem is semantic: the authors “see aging as a time of life, just like childhood, young adulthood, and middle age.” But aging is lifelong, not something that kicks in somewhere north of 40. Better, then, to call that stage “late life” or “elderhood,” and to refrain from using the word “aging” to describe activities and feelings that are age-independent, as the overwhelming majority are. Aging is heterogeneous, as the authors establish early on: the longer we live, the more different from each other we become. Better, then, to reject terms like “the aged” and “the elderly,” which imply the opposite — membership in some homogenous group — and which people never use to describe themselves.

Another overarching characteristic of aging, acknowledged early and often by both authors, is that it is stigmatized. That stigma is rooted in denial — our insistence that we’re “not old,” even as we enter our final decades. “Us versus them” thinking underlies all prejudice; the greatest irony of ageism is that the “other” is our own future selves. At 70 and 64, respectively, Nussbaum and Levmore are writing not about them (“the aged,” the frail, the bingo-players at the senior center), but about us: everyone with more road behind them than ahead. In an ageist world, to acknowledge and even embrace our aging — to challenge its representation as decline alone — is a radical act. Aging thoughtfully involves it, and age equity demands it.

A primary source of age stigma, as the authors address in Chapter Four, is the fact that older bodies, especially women’s, are perceived as unattractive and even repulsive. That distaste should feel familiar; all marginalized people have heard that it’s “natural” for others to be physically repelled by them. As Nussbaum writes, “the idea that the female body is disgusting [is] a staple of misogyny the world over.” She acknowledges that this bias, a physical demotion that awaits us all, perpetuates inequality. Yet, distressingly, she posits that, because evolution favors the reproductively fit, there’s an “element of truth in the stereotype.” Older people are indeed closer to death, but even if revulsion at physical decline is partly to blame for the stigma, why should we give it a pass? Ageism is no more embodied or “natural” than other forms of prejudice, ableism in particular. All such “-isms” are socially constructed, as Nussbaum acknowledges. They’re not about biology, they’re about power. Unless social oppression is called out, we experience that lesser life as “just the way it is.” The reason hundreds of thousands of buff boomers can’t land a job interview isn’t because they have one foot in the grave, it’s because they face entrenched discrimination. Hearteningly, Nussbaum ends the chapter with a rousing call “to oppose this type of immoral — and in many nations illegal — discrimination […] [and join] a movement against self-disgust.” Huzzah!

Chapter Five, “Looking Back,” discusses the nature and purpose of retrospection, comparing the perils of living in the past with the emptiness of inhabiting a hedonistic eternal present. Citing Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, whose characters are immersed in their painful memories, Nussbaum writes, “Whatever retrospective emotions an aging life admits and even seeks, surely this way of avoiding present accountability is both futile, accomplishing nothing good, and ethically heinous.” Her discussion is relevant to all of life, not just old age. In O’Neill’s great play, both parents and offspring are trapped, waking up a day older into an “aging life.”

Levmore rises to the defense of self-absorbed retirees who opt for an eternal present among others of similar age and background. “If this segregation seems like a step back in time, we ought not blame it on real-estate developers,” he writes. Agreed — how about blaming it on a culture that ushers older people out of sight? Given that the most important component of a good old age is a robust social network, what are the downsides to having friends only of one’s own age? If diversity in life is a good thing, why isn’t age a criterion just like race and class, and why shouldn’t older people benefit from this multiplicity as well?

“Why does age matter in romance?” asks Chapter Six, which is packed with insights into how gender and class shape love in late life. Nussbaum’s essay compares a middle-aged woman’s romance with a vapid teenager in Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier to the love between Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. As long as both parties are grown-ups and full participants, she observes, “[a]ge difference in itself means little or nothing.” She concludes by critiquing “the staggering lie […] that love arrives only in neat couples, and that a person can love only one person at a time.” This is a radical thought and an eminently sensible one. Consider sharing!

In Chapter Seven, Levmore offers a raft of economic proposals to assist the (regrettably labeled) “elderly poor,” but he frames them in a deeply problematic way. Arguing that retirees won’t benefit from paid parental leave and a higher minimum wage, for example, ignores the fact that families are multigenerational and that a viable social compact for longer lives should support transfers of all kinds across generations. By the same token, older people should pay school taxes, not only for the greater good but so the guy delivering their oxygen tanks can read the instructions. Yet Levmore disagrees. While praising the effectiveness of programs such as early childhood intervention and job training for young adults, he claims that “it is impossible to make such a case for programs or transfers aimed at the elderly.” And, even more bluntly: “There are superior moral and economic claims when it comes to needy children, and while those arguments and sentiments do not preclude helping the elderly poor, they form a serious barrier in a world with limited resources.” In a book about dealing sensibly with longevity, an argument like this is more than confounding — it’s shocking.

Such zero-sum reasoning pitting generations against each other should always be challenged, not least for ethical reasons — and not only because a robust social safety net benefits everyone sooner or later. In theory at least, we no longer allocate resources by race or gender; why should it be acceptable to weigh the needs of the young against the old? Resources are not inherently scarce, and there are plenty of ways to finance programs that support younger and older people, such as raising taxes on the wealthy and corporations, hiking the capital gains tax, eliminating the carried interest loophole, and cutting military spending. It should be said that Levmore redeems himself in the last chapter with terrific advice on how and when to part with resources. (Hint: Deferral is unwise.)

Nussbaum counters with a welcome — and thoroughly idealistic — approach that focuses not on incapacity but its opposite: “what people can actually do and be.” This agenda requires a set of policies that recognize the extreme diversity of older people and the way we age, combats ageist stereotypes, and supports and protects agency around such priorities as end-of-life choices, privacy, sexual safety and choice, and access to culture. Isn’t this the world we all hope to inhabit to the end, no matter what our circumstances might be?

“The pervasive feeling that capability losses in aging are just ‘natural’ is a huge impediment to the debate we badly need,” Nussbaum writes. Yes, it is, and yes, we do. We have a unique and unprecedented opportunity to exploit the human capital of millions of healthy, educated adults like never before in history. Of course, much about aging is difficult, but much of the difficulty is constructed or compounded by ageism. Of course, aging involves loss, but it also deeply enriches. Let’s tell both sides of the story, and work toward a world where no one ages out of having value as a human being. Aging Thoughtfully advances that goal, portraying the aging process as both universal and utterly idiosyncratic, and urging us to learn from each other and our shared history.

Ashton Applewhite is the author of This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism (2016) and a leading spokesperson for a movement to mobilize against discrimination on the basis of age.

The post A Stigma Rooted in Denial: On Ageism and “Aging Thoughtfully” appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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