Archive for Books
Presidential race and gender
I have always been fascinated about the children’s literature of Brazilian author Monteiro Lobato. So much so that about this time last year I was seriously considering including it in my doctoral dissertation — or maybe even devoting the entire dissertation to it. But in order to do that, I thought it would be a smart idea to read his work for adults and his correspondence, which I did last winter. All of my blog entries of February and March 2007 were devoted to reporting my impressions as I read through Lobato’s adult work (not be mistaken for his mature work, which was entirely dedicated to children).
The last post of this series describes my impression of the book that made me completely give up on Lobato’s work as topic for my thesis. Its title could be translated as “The Black President: a novel set in the year 2228.” It was written in 1926, and it describes a presidential race in the United States in a very very distant future, in which, for the very first time, the two main candidates were a black man and a white woman.
Lobato moved from Brazil to New York in 1922 and was surprised about the overt racism he encountered (not that there wasn’t racism in Brazil, but it wasn’t as overt). The feminist struggle for universal suffrage also made an impression on him (in Brazil, women were only allowed to vote in 1932). The combination of the two gave rise to “The Black President” a book that made me sick to my stomach, for all the racism and sexism it contains.
In my post of a year ago, I said that what impressed me about Lobato was his frankness: he always wrote what he thought, no matter how controversial. Reading “The Black President,” I realized that while this made for some of the best writing I’ve ever read, it also accounted for some of the most offensive writing I’ve ever read.
But another thing about Lobato that always amazed me is how he seems to anticipate situations and discussions that were only to come to the fore decades later. There is definitely something eerie about the way he imagined the dynamics of race and gender in the context of American Presidential elections, and what we read in the news these days. The similarities between 2228 and 2008 disturb me immensely — but I keep trying to remind myself that fiction is merely fiction, and that’s all.
Neoteny
Keeping resolutions is hard. And this finishative business, I tell you, is super hard.
For instance: I broke the resolution I made a few weeks ago to stop reading. This week I read a book. An entire book.
I may claim as attenuating circumstance the fact that it was a non-academic book. Very much so. Though there are somethings in there I can definitely use in school work. In the middle of more or less explicit references to different types of body fluids and more or less elaborate descriptions of their flow, there are real gems, like the following:
“Neoteny” is “remaining young,” and it may be ironic that it is so little known, because human evolution has been dominated by it. Humans have evolved to their relatively high state by retaining the immature characteristics of their ancestors. Humans are the most advanced of mammals – although a case could be made for the dolphins – because they seldom grow up. Behavioral traits such as curiosity about the world, flexibility of response, and playfulness are common to practically all young mammals but are usually rapidly lost with the onset of maturity in all but humans. Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature.
Tom Robbins, in Still Life with the Woodpecker, p. 19.
Russell While-U-Wait
Due to technical difficulties and life interferences, our regular scheduled programmes have been temporarily suspended. We apologise for any inconvenience and/or disappointment this might have caused you.
We will return to our usual assortment of original and semi-original Esterical thoughts soon after thanksgiving (we are all terribly busy with way too many things for which to give thanks).
In the meantime, we leave you with a few quotes from Mr. B. Russell’s educational works for your amusement.
We thank you for your patronage. Come back again soon!
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No political theory is adequate unless it is applicable to children as well as to men and women. Theorists are mostly childless, or if they have children, they are carefully screened from the disturbances which would be caused by youthful turmoil. Some of them have written books on education, but without, as a rule, having any actual children present to their minds while they wrote. (p. 401)
Authority in education is to some extent unavoidable, and those who educate have to find a way of exercising authority in accordance with the spirit of liberty.
Where authority is unavoidable, what is needed is reverence. A man who is to educate well, and is to make the young grow and develop into their full stature, must be filled through and through with the spirit of reverence. It is reverence towards others that is lacking in those who advocate machine-made cast-iron systems.
In education, with its codes of rules emanating from a Government office, its large classes and fixed curriculum and overworked teachers, its determination to produce a dead lever of glib mediocrity, the lack of reverence for the child is all but universal. Reverence requires imagination and vital warmth; it requires most imagination in respect of those who have least actual achievement or power. The child is weak and superficially foolish, the teacher is strong and in an everyday sense wiser than the child. The teacher without reverence, or the bureaucrat without reverence, easily despises the child for these outward inferiorities. He thinks it is his duty to ‘mould’ the child: in imagination he is the potter with the clay. And so he gives to the child some unnatural shape, which hardens with age, producing strains and spiritual dissatisfactions, out of which grow cruelty and envy, and the belief that others must be compelled to undergo the same distortions.The man who has reverence will not think his duty to ‘mould’ the young. (…) In the presence of a child he feels an unaccountable humility – a humility not easily defensible on any rational ground, and yet somehow nearer to wisdom than the easy self-confidence of many parents and teachers. (p. 402-3)
From “Principles of Social Reconstruction”, (1916) in The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell, 1903-1959. Ed. Robert E. Egner and Lester E. Denonn. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1961.
Silent voices
I said in the last post that Timothy Reagan’s “Paideia Redux” was an excellent source of references. One such fascinating reference is to classics scholar Page du Bois.
Quite a polemic writer, du Bois’s main agenda is a call for rereading the
classics. Far from embracing ancient cultures as our ideal, the idea is to critically examine not only how much we have inherited, but also how much we have improved, and how much more there is to improve still.
Some of du Bois’ titles include:
- “Trojan horses : saving the classics from conservatives”
- “Slaves and other objects”
- “Centaurs and amazons : women and the pre-history of the great chain of being”
- “Sappho is burning”
- “Sowing the body : psychoanalysis and ancient representations of women”
- “Torture and truth”
One can see from the titles a concern with the history of “second-class citizens”. These are groups of people like women, foreigners, slaves and even mystical creatures who, in virtue of being different from the dominant class, are often denied the status of “fully human”.
I´ve had a chance to read the chapters on Plato in her “Sapho is burning” and in “Sowing the Body”, and thought they were really excellent. Du Bois argues that even though Plato is ahead of his time in presenting a Socrates who surprisingly regards women as having something clever to say, the women themselves are actually never present in the philosophical discussion. A memorable point, I thought.
Aspasia, Diotima and Sappho speak through Socrates, but they themselves are absent, and have no voice of their own. When women do appear in the dialogues, like Xantippe in the Phaedo, and the flutegirls in the Symposium, they are presented merely as a disturbance in the men’s serious discussions and are asked to leave.
Even the wise Sappho is presented in a voice and terrain other than her own. In a very creative move, Du Bois imagines what a Sapphic poem would be like if Sappho had decided to return the compliment and write a song about the wise Plato.
Page du Bois seems to me another excellent link to make when answering the question “why study the classics”. At the moment I am eagerly waiting for her “Trojan Horses” to arrive in the mail. I´m already ecstatic in the expectation of a “the-harm-done-can-only-be-undone-from-the-inside” approach to the classics.
After all, as we have learned from the Ancient Greeks, there is nothing more powerful than the power that comes from within.
Mastering Civilization
People often wonder what the point is in studying classical cultures, like Ancient Rome, Ancient Greece, Ancient Egypt or Ancient China.
Some people say that it´s because the ancients were the high point of civilization and all went downhill from there.
But I think that, first, that this is to disconsider all the achievements of the last 5, 10, 15 or 20 centuries.
Second, this view neglects the fact that civilizations do not develop linearly. Anyone who has played the computer game Civilization III knows that at any given point, the Zulus might be more technologically advanced, though not as widespread as the Greeks, just as the Iroquois might be more culturally developed, though not as strongly armed as the Romans.
To say, therefore, that one given civilization, present or past, or is more civilized than another is one-sided, not only in the sense that it is simplistic (“what counts as civilized?”) but also in the sense of being parochial and borderline unfair.
Another view would be to say that we study ancient cultures for mere curiosity. In this sense, it does not really matter whether you study Ancient Rome or Ancient Tupi-Guarani: they are all dead and gone, and equally irrelevant to the current reality.
I also find this view parochial, though in a chronological rather than geographical sense. To have this attitude is to disregard an immense wealth about what makes human civilization what it is. It is like running the risk of reinventing the wheel just because we have no time for realizing that it’s already been done before.
Timothy Reagan´s “Paideia Redux: A Contemporary Case for the Classics” is the best lead I found for the question of “why study the classics?.” Not only does it make a great case for the relevance of the Classics on the issues that press the post-modern world, but it is a great source for other fascinating reads on the topic.
The connections that Reagan makes between current theories and ancient theories, and with other authors writing on this topic, illustrates well both my personal take on why study the classics, and my best strategy for doing well in the the Civilization game.
That is, both as a civilization and as an individual player, we all start in different locations, with access to different resources and different specific skills. Our specificities are at same time a plus and a limitation: a civilization with lots of hills has more access to iron and more defense points, but more difficulty for locomotion and for agriculture. A military civilization makes stronger armies, but takes longer to develop culturally.
We only have to gain in connecting with other civilizations as early in the game as possible. In this way, we can multiply both our access to resources (which depend on the specificities of our territory) as well as the speed in which we make technological advances (for while one invents the wheel the other is already inventing literacy, and the willingness to share makes both civilization stronger).
One might complain that the purpose of the game is still to outdo the other civilizations, and we can only win if at some point we break our allegiance with them, and leave them behind.
To this I reply that it all depends on why and how you play the game. For those who, like me, play it repeatedly, simply beating the adversary has no thrill. The fun is in playing a better game than before and in improving on my previous scores. And this (as I found from trial and error – lots of it), comes from making as many allegiances as possible, as early as possible.
But there are other games we only have the chance to play once. As far as I know, life is one of those.
References, Alusions and Recommendations:- Sid Meier´s Civilization III
- Reagan, Timothy. “Paideia Redux: A Contemporary Case for the Classics.” Journal of Thought 38.3 (2003): 21-39.
- Burbules, Nicholas C., and Rupert Berk. “Critical Thinking and Critical Pedagogy: Relations, Differences, and Limits.” Changing Terrains of Knowledge and Politics. Ed. Thomas S. Popkewitz and Lynn Fendler. New York: Routledge, 1999. 45-65.
Emile, Emilia and philosophy
I think that it was Jane Roland Martin in her “Reclaiming a Conversation: the Ideal of the Educated Woman” (but I don´t have the book here with me) who, after pointing out how inadequate Sophie is a model for the ideal woman, calls for a new female counterpart for Emile, an Emily to replace Sophie.
My first acquaintance with J.R. Martin was with sections of “Reclaiming a Conversation” on Rousseau and Wollstonecraft last autumn. I found the argument so persuasive and baffling, that I packed the first couple of chapters of the book, the introduction and the one on Plato, and brought them with me to my summer vacations back home in Brazil.
These two chapters were high on my reading list, and I read them right away. And all of a sudden, I wished I had brought the whole book. I found these two chapters even more persuasive and baffling than the two I had read. I think this was probably because the first addressed introduction to philosophy in general (ch.1) and Plato in particular (ch. 2), topics I had spent most of my academic life thinking about. As for the two chapters I read last year, one dealt with an author I hadn´t read much; the other an author I had never even heard of.
As I now read the book from the very beginning, many of the pennies collected when I read the Rousseau and the Wollstonecraft chapters finally dropped. In particular, I suddenly realised that I had already met Emily. Or rather, Emília. Actually, I had known her all my life! She is all that Rousseau´s Sophie is not: nosy, irreverent, extremely clever, daring, independent, even bossy. She was created in Brazil in the 1920´s. It was Emília and her friends in a little ranch in the Brazilian countryside that introduced me to a great deal of world literature. Including Ancient Greek. Including philosophical characters like Socrates. And that before I was even 10!
“Plato´s Female Guardians”, the chapter on Plato, put me into the mode: “This makes so much sense, how come I never thought about it this way?” It was a kind of Copernican revolution, or a Kuhnian change of paradigms. So I did this “intellectual regression” thing, to see where it was that I bought into the normal approach.
As I mentioned in the previous post, before I was a Socrates´s fan, I was fascinated with Greek mythology, especially the goddess Athena. I was first exposed to Greek mythology throught this series of 16 children´s books which I devoured when I was about 9-10 years old. The books were written from 1921 to 1946, and it is called “O Sítio do Picapau Amarelo”, literally “The Yellow Woodpecker Ranch”. (Worth noticing that the yellow woodpecker is to Brazil as the Beaver is to Canada.)
The series were very well-written, and became TV shows several times, and I think there is a new re-make still on. Most of the stories take place on the ranch, and involve themes that mix Brazilian folklore with world literature like Cervantes, Hans Standen, Grimm brothers, Peter Pan, Lewis Carroll, and Ancient Greek mythology, as well as other ´subjects´ like math, grammar, history, geography and biology.
I was thinking about all this, and even though I had to admit what she said seemed really on the mark (more and more so the deeper I got into academic philosophy), it struck me that my childhood learning experience was not really like what Martin described in “Reclaiming a Conversation”. And the reason, as I now realised, was that, in my intellectual history, before there was Socrates, there was Emília. And that made all the difference.
Emília was all Socrates was and more: she was a little Brazilian female gadfly, that left even Socrates in awe (yes, in volume 11 they meet! And even good old Socrates was stunned!).
It seems that this collection of books does not yet appear in English, though it does make to a few sites, like wikipedia (links below). I found about 50 articles on him on Scholars´ Portal, mostly in Portuguese. Now I really want to dig deeper into this, and have tons to say about how well it predates Martin (re: women) and Freire (re: Brazilian culture). But so that you have an idea of how the story goes, let me give you a rough translation of two memorable encounters: with Pericles and Socrates.
BACKGROUND: Dona Benta, an old widow, lives on a ranch with her grandaughter Lúcia, a.k.a Narizinho (“Funny Nose”) and her friend and cook Aunt Nastácia (short for Anastácia), a black woman. Pedrinho (“Pete”), same age as Narizinho, lives in the city, and comes visit his grandmother on vacations. Emília starts as Narizinho´s ragdoll, made by Aunt Nastácia, who somehow becomes alive, and practically runs the show. Another important figure is the wise Viscount, a corncob, also brought to life the same way as Emília.
In this particular piece, written in 1937, Aunt Nastácia suddenly goes missing, and the whole ranch´s gang goes to Pericles´ Athens to find her. At the moment, they are at Pericles´ palace, being entertained by his extremely wise wife Aspasia (this is important, I´ll come back to this later), and Pericles himself. Here´s a dialogue between Dona Benta and Pericles (rough translation). I am leaving the gender markers as they appear in the original.
In the courtyard the great Greek statesman continued to chat with the old woman. They were discussing politics.
“We have conquered aristocracy, madam,” he said. “Today Greece is positively governed by the people. Solon revealed his genius when he conceived our form of government. There is no imposition on any man. The governor is chosen by the people. I, for instance, put into practice that which the people desire – this is why they continue to re-elect me.”
“You are an exceptional case,” Dona Benta argued, “you say you follow the will of the people, but in fact your intelligence and your excellent speeches are what make the people desire this or that. It is you, not the people, who govern Athens.”
“I see that madam has an acute eye for psychology,´ said Pericles smiling. “The people are like children. They want to be led – but with the appearance that in fact it is they who lead and command. (Esterical note: at this point any doubt that the reference to Rousseau´s Emile is deliberate is completely dispelled). “My system, however, is to desire nothing that goes against the will of the people. I am an interpreter of their desires – and the enlightener of the city. (…)”
“I notice an error in your words when you refer to “the people”, Mr. Pericles. It is not the people who govern Athens, but the small class of citizens. “People” means the whole population. But there are here 400 thousand slaves who do not have the right to vote. This is unjust, and will be Greece´s doom.”
Pericles was stunned that anyone could see things that way.
“But they are slaves, madam! Slaves are slaves!”
“You´re mistaken, Mr. Pericles. A man does not stop being a man in virtue of being a slave; and a society that divides men into freemen and slaves is condemned to disappear.”
This idea made the Greek man laugh:
“Do you think then that there can be a society without slaves and masters? Who will do the heavy work?”
“A just society cannot have slaves, Mr. Pericles, and in such a society all the work will be done by freemen. That´s how it is in the modern world I come from…
And so on and so forth. Actually, it gets even better, with references to Aristotle, Brazilian slaverly, Plato and European totalitarism on this same page, and Socrates and Emília coming in the next chapter. And this is what I read at the age of 9! No wonder I was such a strange girl – and still am. But you´re probably tired by now, I for one am exhausted. So I´ll do the rest later. But should you be curious, here are some sites with a bit of background info on author and work:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Woodpecker_Ranch
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monteiro_Lobato
http://www.vidaslusofonas.pt/monteiro_lobato2.htm
Stay tuned for the next episode of Ester´s intellectual diary.
