18 posts from July 2009

Black Money is a Frontline documentary on the use of bribery in high places. Its principle focus is a business deal between the British government, the British Aerospace company BAE, and the Saudi royal family. Its greatest challenge is that the deal it is seeking to report on, is secret. Ostensibly to allow the Saudis to buy American arms without going through Congressional publicity, the deal allows the Saudis to purchase things from American companies without anyone but those companies knowing apparently. But under the veil of privacy, millions and billions of dollars can be spent for the benefit of those people making the deal.

Portions of the movie will make excellent fodder for a discussion in my Ethics class next Fall I suspect as it contains numerous interviews with people who hold different perceptions of what it means to be ethical at that level of money making. For example, if a deal is obtained by means of a bribe and that deal enhanced Britain’s’ anti-terrorism alliances, provides jobs for British subjects, and keeps a key ally in the Middle East (The Saudi Royal Family) happy, might not the utilitarian’s consider it “right”? Is a law that forbids companies from influencing the people making a foreign companies business choices undermining a business owner’s right to pursue a source of income for himself or herself and a company’s employees? Or is that law an attempt to make it clear that the use of kickbacks to the people high in the decision making food chain is wrong for some more fundamental reason than pragmatic outcomes?

If a bank offers a customer a free toaster for opening a checking account, is it guilty of a bribe? How is it different if the British government offers a Saudi prince a free airplane for choosing its aerospace company to purchase jets? Where are the lines? I suppose much depends on the powers that have been granted to those making the deal and whether or not the benefits the dealmakers derive would not want those who gave them power to make the deal to know.

For what it is worth, no one has ever offered to bribe me.

Question for comment: How do explain the National Debt to a child who will have to pay it?

The setting of this semi-historical film is England’s late 18^th century convict deportations to Australia. In short, the War with the rebellious American colonies was costing Britain a pretty penny and they already had debts from the French and Indian War to pay for. For some time, London had been shipping convicts off to Georgia so there was ample precedent for saving the expense and hassle of caring for criminals in the jails and prison barges of London by shipping them off to Botony Bay. This movie is the story of one such prisoner, Mary Broad (later Bryant) and her trials as a prisoner and escapee from the penal colony.

 Quite frankly, it is a horrific story. You might think of it as a cross between Swiss Family Robinson, Lord of the Flies, and Thomas Hobbes’ The Leviathan. People’s lives were, as Hobbes puts it, “nasty, brutish, and short” and the lives of the women sent along with their brother convicts were even more appalling.  When nightmares have nightmares, they look like this.

Mary states in her defense, after being arrested for escaping the colony:

“I am no hero, and I have no ambition to be made into one. There are some in this court today who have tried to make me something that I am not. I am guilty as charged, as are the two men standing beside me. Not many of us transported can claim to be innocent - some are wicked, and deserve to be feared, but most are not. Most are men and women who risked their lives to feed themselves and their families. Guilty we may be, but worthless we are not. There are many like us in this country, and to transport us away is another country's gain, and this country's loss. Those that survive the harshness of the colonies are the true heroes. I tried to build a life amongst them, and would have been content to be their companion, but I stole away for the sake of my children, I could not see them starve. I have lost everything I hold dear to me, my husband, my children. So you can take my life, but these men- the courage they have should not be choked out of them.”

Question for comment: Do you think anyone might ever make a movie out of your life? Is there anything inspiring about the way that you have overcome obstacles?

Jane Eyre. Everything is in the name. Her first name speaks of her human plainness. Her second of her human spirit. And everything in the novel is about balance and the divine help that is needed to keep from being swamped and scuttled by our two masters (earth and soul). God made humans from earth and breath, the Bible says (and Koran). Babylonian creation myths say it was mud and blood. Anyway you look at us, we are fire and ice and Charlotte Bronte’s novel makes it clear that in some people, these extremes are ideal fodder for novel making.

Jane Eyre is a deeply passionate, emotional, volatile, and ferocious feeler. She is also a deeply moral, rational, reserved, and cerebral individual as well. Because of the deprivations, injustices, abandonments, abuses, and humiliations she suffers as a child, she has learned to keep her passionate self in check. Outbreaks of emotion as a child led to her persecution and isolation in “the red room”. She learns to discipline that aspect of herself thereby. Otherwise it would literally destroy people. She is deeply influenced by her friend, Helen Burns, a child who inspires Jane with her almost inhuman (and perhaps it is a denial of humanity) appearance to have been eviscerated of a dark and retributive nature. I almost wonder if Bronte has intentionally given her a name (Helen Burns) that speaks of the eradication of the “wilder” side of a woman’s psyche (Helen of Troy being a woman who runs off with the rascal Paris and thus incubates a decade long war, bloodshed, and killing).

Rochester, on the other hand, is a Byronic hero, full of passion and fury and chaotic impulses that threaten to overwhelm his inkling to live in some form of respectable order.

The bond between Jane and Rochester appears to be so intense and grapplehooking precisely because they find their banished selves in each other. Rochester is that impulsive, destructive, volcano that Jane can’t let out. Jane is that domesticated discipline that Rochester can never seem to find within himself when he is so constantly mid rant, or mid lust, or mid rage.

This is why Jane cannot bear the thought of marriage to St. John. He is too much like her. Indeed, he is more like her repressed external self than she is. The thought of living with someone who would only strengthen and deepen the restrictions she has placed on her passionate self is nauseating to her. It would essentially chain her up further than she has chained herself.

When St. John proposes marriage to Jane later in the novel, she concludes that

“[a]s his curate, his comrade, all would be right. . . . But as his wife—at his side always, and always restrained, and always checked—forced to keep the fire of my nature continually low, to compel it to burn inwardly and never utter a cry, though the imprisoned flame consumed vital after vital—this would be unendurable.”

Rochester is constantly associated with fire and she understands on some deep level that her way of surviving as a child entailed freezing herself rather than reacting passionately to the wounds inflicted on her. To pack her ice cubed soul in more ice with St. John is tantamount to dyeing completely. The question of course is whether or not Rochester can find some way of cooling himself off a little because he is passionate to the point of being dangerous.

The following are just some of the quotes in the novel that speak to the struggle between “chaos and control” in Jane Eyre, Rochester, and St. John. Note well that it seems as though every soul in the novel needs some sort of balance. And the greater the repression of the need to “live dangerously”; “on the edge”; “in the fire” the greater the psyche will demand compensation in some other fashion. St. John the repressed, the man who cannot and will not let himself go to the affections he holds for Rosamond, feels compelled to sail off to some exotic land where he can risk martyrdom. Jane, the pious, keeps coming back to, dreaming about, and falling into the arms of the “forbidden and dangerous man”. And Rochester the free spirit, keeps trying to escape from the compelling gravitational pull of Jane Eyre’s implacable decency. “I desired liberty; for liberty I gasped; for liberty I uttered a prayer;” says Jane,

 “It seemed scattered on the wind then faintly blowing. I abandoned it and framed a humbler supplication; for change, stimulus: that petition, too, seemed swept off into vague space: "Then, " I cried, half desperate, "grant me at least a new servitude!" (p. 86). “It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility;” she adds, “they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.”

Jayne craves order and wants desperately to live in an ordered, stable family. But she has a lot of feelings to burn and cannot seem to help herself when she senses herself near that burning chaos that her soul also wants to throw itself into. Indeed, listen to her describe what she feels about her connection to Rochester:

“I was tossed on a buoyant but unquiet sea, where billows of trouble rolled under surges of joy. I thought sometimes I saw beyond its wild waters a shore, sweet as the hills of Beulah; and now and then a freshening gale, wakened my hope, bore my spirit, triumphantly towards the bourne: but I could not reach it, even in fancy,--a counteracting breeze blew off land, and continually drove me back. Sense would resist delirium; judgment would warn passion (p. 154).

She refers to that place that Rochester lures her towards as “mirey wilds”. But everything seems to be demanding one or the other. Reason, order, family, domesticity OR the wild tempestuous affair in some villa in the Mediterranean.

“It does good to no woman to be flattered by her superior, who cannot possibly intend to marry her; and it is madness in all women to let a secret love kindle within them, which, if unreturned and unknown, must devour the life that feeds it; and, if discovered and responded to, must lead, ignis-fatuus-like, into miry wilds whence there is no extrication ["] (p. 163).”

Jane’s  jealousy of Blanche Ingram is simply over this. She knows that at some level, Rochester is NOT a well ordered domesticated pet of a man. “I thought Miss Ingram happy,” she says, “because one day she might look into the abyss at her leisure, explore its secrets and analyze their nature (pp. 190-91). Thus Rochester contains within him an “abyss” - a word that describes a dark place where both dangers and discoveries lurk. Rochester as much as confesses this reality to her. "To live, for me, Jane is to stand on a crater-crust which may crack and spue fire any day" (p. 219).

The question I would ask any reader is this. Are we not all standing in such a place with respect to ourselves? Have we allowed ourselves to become so domesticated in our theologies, or creativities, or sexualites, or intensities that we are utterly predictable to ourselves? Have we, like Helen Burns really resolved the angers that we feel over the injustices we have experienced.  Have we really determined to live our lives content with safe places always? When Jane evaluates her two cousins, Georgiana and Eliza, she affirms something central to Charlotte Bronte’s argument I think, “Feeling without judgment is a washy draught indeed; but judgment untempered by feeling is too bitter and husky a morsel for human deglutition" (p. 240). For Jane Eyre a life of passion unchaperoned by reason would be a life not to her liking. But she ABSOLUTELY cannot gag down the opposite – a life of pure unmitigated reasoned order. The first she can drink with her nose plugged but the later is unthinkable. Why? Simply because overcontrol is principally the imbalance that she has lived with her entire life thus far I suspect.

Carl Jung referred to this “red” and fiery aspect of Jane’s somewhat repressed self as “the shadow”. Jungians generally assert that we will often go looking for that which we repress in ourselves when we go looking for partners in life. By becoming one with someone who expresses our forbidden selves for us, we “get” to express ourselves vicariously while at the same time remaining conveniently unblemished by being who we really are. Rochester does not WANT to discipline himself. He has gotten much pleasure from not doing so. It is no wonder that he desperately needs Jane’s self disciplined morality to “be” him for him. Never does he make this more clear than when he tells her "You are my sympathy--my better self--my good angel" (p. 320).

What is scary is just how dangerous this can be to ourselves for we may easily attach ourselves to someone who IS worse than the repressed part of ourselves and get intoxicated with the connection. Here is Jane as she senses that she is losing the aspect of herself that she had so long long repressed:

“My future husband was becoming to me my whole world; and more than the world; almost my hope of heaven. He stood between me and every thought of religion, as an eclipse intervenes between man and the broad sun. I could not, in those days, see God for his creature of whom I had made an idol (p. 279).”

"One idea only still throbbed life-like within me--a remembrance of God" (p. 301).

And here is how she feels at the prospect of losing that connection to her externalize self (i.e. when she realizes that she must leave Rochester because he is still married or accept an unprincipled role as his mistress:

“It was near; and as I had lifted no petition to Heaven to avert it--as I had neither joined my hands, nor bent my knees, nor moved my lips--it came; in full, heavy swing that torrent poured over me. The whole consciousness of my life lorn, my love lost, my hope quenched, my faith death-struck, swayed full and mighty above me in one sullen mass. That bitter hour cannot be described: in truth, "the waters came into my soul; I sank in deep mire: I felt no standing; I came into deep waters; the floods overflowed me" (p. 301).

In the movie, Rochester promises Jane that if she will stay with him, they can live together in chaste company. He will do no more than give her a kiss on the cheek on her birthday. They will live together as brother and sister, he says. I confess, I understand why the director made this decision but I wanted to strangle her. Because in the novel, Rochester is NOT self controlled. He is passionate on the point of almost raping her. He is, in fact, dangerous. Not almost dangerous. Jane Eyre has gone after a dangerous person and the directors have watered him down just enough to make him “decent and respectable.” But the whole point of Bronte’s characterization of Rochester is that he was not a man on the verge of excess trying not to go over. He is a man over the edge of excess trying to climb back. "Jane! will you hear reason?" he says to her, bringing his lips to her ear, "because, if you won't, I'll try violence." His voice was hoarse; his look that of a man who is just about to burst an insufferable bond and plunge headlong into wild license (p. 307).

We are looking at the place where we enter the world of domestic violence and even sexual violence. But the makers of this movie make the reasoned judgment that to portray Rochester in this light will to be to ruin him as a love interest and the movie as a romance.  This is precisely where Dorothy Canfield Fisher would say the following:

“by pretending that anything is different from what it really is, either by our explicit statement or by implication. The prettifying of human relations in conventional, old-fashioned, 19th century fiction, was responsible for some ghastly shocks, when the readers of those pleasant books came up, in real life, against something which the novels they had read had led them to assume did not exist.”

Jane’s response to the intensity of Rochester’s desire is interesting. It is something that challenges her. It is something that she seems to have needed to bring out of him because it was necessary to bringing something out of herself. “I saw that in another moment, and with one impetus of frenzy more, I should be able to do nothing with him,” she says,

“The present--the passing second of time--was all I had in which to control and restrain him: a movement of repulsion, flight, fear, would have sealed my doom,-- and his. But I was not afraid: not in the least. I felt an inward power; a sense of influence, which supported me. The crisis was perilous; but not without its charm: such as the Indian, perhaps, feels when he slips over the rapid in his canoe.” (p. 307).

This is the abyss that she needs. The adventure. The “you-could-kill-yourself-doing-that” challenge that she, as a human being felt she needed. Perhaps because women of her era were not allowed to live dangerously in any way.

One of the most famous passages from the entire novel speaks to this problem of women never allowed to test their abilities against anything dangerous because men had relegated all such challenges to themselves.

“Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth. Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.”

When Rochester speaks of his marriage to the lunatic, Bertha, he confesses that he was basically a victim of his own impulses, having never been taught to discipline them with reason.

"I was dazzled, stimulated: my senses were excited; and being ignorant, raw, and inexperienced, I thought I loved her" (p. 310). I suppose this would not have been a problem if, upon realizing it, he had determined to “grow up”. But this is not what he wants to do. He wants to rely on Jane to be his grown up for him. You can see the red lights blinking by this time I am sure, Because she is precisely at that point in time in life when she wants desperately to STOP being the grown up all the time.

Nothing saves this couple besides … well … God and obedience. Or an appeal to God and a willingness to obey. First by her and later by him. “I was experiencing an ordeal” Jane says,

“A hand of fiery iron grasped my vitals. Terrible moment: full of struggle, blackness, burning! Not a human being that ever lived could wish to be loved better than I was loved; and him who thus loved me I absolutely worshipped: and I must renounce love and idol. One drear word comprised my intolerable duty--'Depart!'" (p. 321).

It is precisely here that a third member of the human psyche enters the conflict. Neither reason nor emotion nor passion but conscience.

“Still indomitable was the reply--"I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will keep the law given by God; sanctioned by man. I will hold to the principles received by me when I was sane, and not mad--as I am now. Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour; stringent are they; inviolate they shall be. If at my individual convenience I might break them, what would be their worth? They have a worth--so I have always believed; and if I cannot believe it now, it is because I am insane--quite insane: with my veins running fire, and my heart is beating faster than I can count its throbs. Preconceived opinions, foregone determinations, are all I have at this hour to stand by: there I plant my foot" (pp. 322-23).

And thus she takes her leave.

And the separation saves them.

Both of them are forced to come to the place, once separated from one another, where they can grow up. To allow some aspect of themselves, be it emotional or rational or spiritual, to mature so that when they come back together, they can enjoy the natural affinity they have for one another without the insanity of being immature or simply mature FOR each other.  "Propensities and principles must be reconciled by some means" (p. 362) St. Jon says, and this may well be the central assertion of the book. Maybe some times in life we need someone to serve as a catalyst in our development. But maybe also if that same person stays too long, they can do more harm than good.

While living with the Rivers family apart from the dysfunctional and abusive Reeds and the mercurial and dangerous Rochester, Jane is able to make some self discoveries that are essential to her maturing. "It was my nature to feel pleasure in yielding to authority supported like hers;” Jane says of Diana Rivers, “and to bend, where my conscience and self- respect permitted, to an active will" (p., 349). What she had to learn was how to be an active will herself. She had to learn to stand up to domineering men in particular, and St. John, though on opposite poles from Rochester in principles, is equally his match in assertiveness towards her. St. John is as unbalanced towards soul as Rochester is toward carnality but they both demand that Jane stand up to them.

For Jane, St. John is a test of her will.

“By degrees, he acquired a certain influence over me that took away my liberty of mind: his praise and notice were more restraining than his indifference. I could no longer talk or laugh freely when he was by. . . . When he said "go," I went! "come," I came; "do this," I did it. But I did not love my servitude; I wished, many a time, he had continued to neglect me (pp. 404-5).

Even St. John’s kiss feels like a passport into more of the same overcontrol that she has subjected herself to her whole life. "I felt as if the kiss were a seal affixed to my fetters" she writes (p. 405).

A few pages later, she says,

“I felt veneration for St. John--veneration so strong that its impetus thrust me at once to the point I had so long shunned. I was tempted to cease struggling with him--to rush down the torrent of his will into the gulf of his existence, and there lose my own” (pp. 419-20).

One cannot help but notice how Bronte has portrayed these various characters as tripartite beings incarnated. Her humans are on their way to becoming fully human or they are stuck at some place, needing the dynamite of a powerful personality to blow a hole in the dam that constricts the flow of their maturity. These characters resist but eventually must grow up emotionally. These characters resist but eventually must grow up as rational beings. These characters resist but eventually must grow up as volitional beings. These characters resist but eventually must grow up as physical beings. These elements of their personalities MUST be integrated so that they are not simply taking turns “mugging them”. There is no other way by which they can be happy. The problem with each of their lives thus far has simply been this tendency to live life with aspects of personality living a binary existence, taking turns with their lives rather than working in collaboration. “I know no medium,” confesses Jane,

“I never in my life have known any medium in my dealings with positive, hard characters, antagonistic to my own, between absolute submission and determined revolt. I have always faithfully observed the one, up to the moment of bursting, sometimes with volcanic vehemence (p. 407).

And that is what has to stop happening.

Why does she go back to Rochester when she can have St. John? Why does she chose the adventure of Rochester’s abyss to the adventure of life in the exatic East? I would submit that it was because St. John was too much of what she was already. He was too strong in an aspect of self that she was strong in already. He did not need her. She did not need him.

“... he [St. John] surrounded me with his arm, almost as if he loved me (I say almost--I knew the difference--for I had felt what it was to be loved; but, like him, I had now put love out of the question and thought only of duty)... (p. 426).

And this was not the case in her connection with Rochester of whom she says

“His countenance reminded one of a lamp quenched, waiting to be relit--and alas! it was not himself that could now kindle the lustre of animated expression: he was dependent on another for that office! (p. 447).

Does this counter everything I have said above? Is dependence a good thing in a relationship? I would say “yes”. Is independence a good thing in a relationship? I would say “yes”. How would I explain the paradox? I would say this: If either the desire for dependence or independence causes one to feel the need to sacrifice some aspect of themselves, to sacrifice its desire to mature, than either one can be unhealthy.

It is this balance that the two seem to find by the end of the novel. Needless to say to some extent it requires a lucky fortune to fall in Jane’s lap and a tragic misfortune to take Rochester’s sight and arm. But between their individual maturization and circumstances, their lives find the balance they need to be happy.

“There was no harassing restraint, no repressing of glee and vivacity with him; for with him I was at perfect ease, because I knew I suited him: all I said or did seemed either to console or revive him. Delightful consciousness! It brought to life and light my whole nature: in his presence I thoroughly lived; and he lived in mine. Blind as he was, smiles played over his face, joy dawned on his forehead: his lineaments softened and warmed” (p. 444).

 To Rochester, the relationship demanded that they only obtain it through fire and ice and suffering. And He believes the arrangement of all these factors to be the work of some divine wisdom ordering the affairs of men for their ultimate maturity and happiness. “I did wrong” he says in reference to his previous request that she live with him as a mistress,

“I would have sullied my innocent flower--breathed guilt on its purity: the Omnipotent snatched it from me. I, in my stiff-necked rebellion, almost cursed the dispensation: instead of bending to the decree, I defied it. Divine justice pursued its course; disasters came thick on me: I was forced to pass through the valley of the shadow of death. . . . Of late Jane--only--only of late--I began to see and acknowledge the hand of God in my doom. I began to experience remorse, repentance; the wish for reconcilement to my Maker. I began sometimes to pray: very brief prayers they were, but very sincere” (p. 454).

Would that we could all achieve the same with a little less pain I guess. How this novel would have turned out if the insane Bertha had not thrown herself off the tower, I do not know.Thanks for the excellent study guide to the novel found HERE. Though all errors in the above are my own.

Question for Comment: Do you find yourself on Rochester’s path of maturization or Jane Eyre’s? Why?

Over the years, I have discovered that, given time, people will create a narrative of the events and motives of their personal lives that can effectively be used to transfer, deflect, or dissipate guilt for what they have done to other people. It is often a subtle process that begins by telling the story in a way quite calculated to protect one’s ego from harm to a person who does not know enough about the actual story to counter it. After telling the narrative often enough, it obtains a status of actuality by means of repetition without dissent. The events as decribed come to have actually happened that way by repetition.

What happens in global conflict is simply that the victor in any conflict gets the power to repeat their narrative until it becomes “what happened” with a force that is even stronger than what happened. What is said to have happened most frequently and without dissent is eventually more “true” than what may actually be true.  

An interesting case of this phenomenon is the prison journal Japanese Admiral Hideki Tojo. After WWII, Tojo was put on trial (and executed) for war crimes. In the days before his death, he kept a diary of his fundamental arguments, justifying Japan’s actions in launching the attack on Pearl Harbor. Ironically, the “day that will live in infamy” for him is not the day that his air force attacked the American fleet in Hawaii. It is the day that America refused to compromise diplomatically with Japan over Japan’s involvement in Manchurian China, combined with the declaration that Japanese assets were to be frozen in the United States and that further commerce of necessary goods would be suspended.

From the American point of view, Japan was involved in a war of aggression against China and had established a puppet state there. From the American perspective, Japanese intentions were for world domination and racial superiority. Tojo sees things differently.

“Immediately before the beginning of the Great East Asian war [which commenced on December 7, 1941], Japan was still engaged in the unfortunate Sino-Japanese War, which had already gone on for more than four years. Throughout that period, Japan had made honest efforts to keep the destruction of war from spreading and, based on the belief that all nations of the world should find their places, had followed a policy designed to restore an expeditious peace between Japan and China. Japan was ensuring the stability of East Asia while contributing to world peace. Nevertheless, China was unfortunately unable to understand Japan's real position, and it is greatly to be regretted that the Sino-Japanese War became one of long duration.”

For Tojo, the war was a result of misunderstandings between the American and Japanese governments regarding what Japanese soldiers were doing in China. I suspect that a similar claim could be made when the right to place American soldiers in Iraq is asserted.

“Despite Japan's desires and efforts, unfortunate differences in the ways that Japan, England, the United States, and China understood circumstances, together with misunderstandings of attitudes, made it impossible for the parties to agree. Up until the very end, these were important reasons for the outbreak of war, and from Japan's point of view, this is a matter of great regret.”

From Tojo’s perspective, the American support for Chiang Kai-Shek was what was thwarting the peace effort in China. Not the presence of the Japanese military.

“Thus, England and the United States supported the Chungking [Chinese] government [of Chiang Kai-Shek] in every way, obstructed the peace between Japan and China that Japan desired, and thwarted Japan's efforts towards East Asian stability.”

This support was extended to include an American economic “blockade” of Japan in relation to essential goods and war materials.  

“During this period, in July 1939, the United States suddenly gave notice of the abrogation of the treaty of commerce [signed in 1911, its termination restricted the importation of essential raw materials] thereby threatening the existence of the Japanese people. At present, looking back coolly upon the past, I think that both nations have much to reflect upon.”

What does he mean by saying that BOTH nations have much to reflect on? Quite clearly, he means that by cutting Japan off from its oil supplies instead of pursuing negotiations, American STARTED THE WAR. For Tojo, the economic consequences of America’s strong arm tactics put Japan in a “no-way-out-but-fight” position.

“At about that time, in order for Japan to sustain its own people, and because of the necessity of maintaining internal production, and in order to prosecute the Sino-Japanese War, we were faced with the necessity of obtaining such things as rice and oil from the southern islands, including French and Dutch Indochina. Particularly at the time when the United States broke off commercial relations with Japan, and the routes that depended on the United States were cut, the survival of Japan was closely connected to whether or not peaceful commerce would be possible with these southern areas.”

To secure supply lines, The Japanese took a more aggressive approach to resource laden South Indochina, setting off a chain reaction of fears in England and America.

“However, the British-American side called this a threat to their own territories, and in July 1941, together with Holland, ordered the freezing of assets and, in effect, commenced an economic blockade.”

Tojo notes that Britain and America began to militarize first. Like Germany in 1914, Japan began to feel itself being “encircled”. It is the feeling of a caribou who has not been actually bitten yet by a pack of wolves that is slowly inching closer and increasing in numbers. For Tojo, America was threatening Japan. Not visa versa.  

“This was a grave threat to the existence of Japan. In addition to this, the British-American side concentrated troops in Hawaii, the Philippines, Singapore, and Malaya, and reinforced their defenses. In this way, economic pressure was increased just as the circle around Japan was tightened, and conditions arose that severely threatened the existence of Japan.”

Again, the dominoes of fear begin to fall and the conflict begins to escalate. In response to their fears, Japan invests more in its military. In response, Britain and America invest more. In response, Japan invests more. And so on. One of the most prescient cartoons of the WWI period in England is a cartoon where someone says “We have to build a battleship that will be bigger than the battleship our enemies will build when they hear what a big battleship we have built.” (rough paraphrase.) Tojo refers to Japanese arms spending as “preparing for passive national defense”.

“One of the reasons that Japan prepared for a passive national defense was the worsening conditions in the Pacific, but this was not the main reason.”

It reminds me of the Cuban Missile Crisis (which took place a month before I was born) where President John f.Kennedy kept referring to Soviet missiles in Cuba as “offensive nuclear weapons” and to American nuclear missiles in Turkey as “defensive nuclear weapons”. As if nuclear weapons come in two forms. In Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s war message, he makes it clear that America was the power seeking diplomatic peace between the countries. In Tojo’s narrative, it is the Americans who gave up on diplomatic initiatives. Tojo writes:

“The hope for a peaceful solution by means of a summit meeting thus disappeared, but Japan, wishing to reach a solution through diplomatic means, made several later proposals in response to the American position. However, the United States held firm to its initial position and would concede nothing.”

In short, Tojo is arguing that what the Americans were trying to call “diplomacy” was really simply “bullying”. America had laid down an ultimatum and labeled it a “diplomatic effort.” Meanwhile they were conducting what amounted to an economic war, denying natural resources to Japan that it absolutely needed. (It is interesting that Japan, more than any other country, has determined to never allow itself to be so totally dependent on energy imports and now has the most robust nuclear energy supply on the planet.)

“During this period, Japan's peaceful commercial relations were successively obstructed, primarily by the American rupture of commercial relations, and this was a grave threat to the survival of Japan. In particular, the economic blockade by the various powers, led by the United States, inflicted a mortal blow to the survival of Japan.”

Again and again, Tojo repeats the narrative that, had Japan won the war, would not doubt have become “the” history of the origins of the conflict rather than just his his own personal interpretation:

“Japan attempted to circumvent these dangerous circumstances by diplomatic negotiation, and though Japan heaped concession upon concession, in the hope of finding a solution through mutual compromise, there was no progress because the United States would not retreat from its original position. Finally, in the end, the United States repeated demands that, under the circumstances, Japan could not accept: complete withdrawal of troops from China . . . At this point, Japan lost all hope of reaching a resolution through diplomatic negotiation.”

“Since events had progressed as they had, it became clear that to continue in this manner was to lead the nation to disaster. With options thus foreclosed, in order to protect and defend the nation and clear the obstacles that stood in its path, a decisive appeal to arms was made.”

Underlying the whole conflict is a difference in the story being told about why Japan was in China in the first place. Again, for most Americans, the American military finds itself in Iraq for reasons of “self defense”. It should come as no wonder to us that others might not see it as so. To Tojo, Japan was forced to use coercive means in China largely by the way that America and Europe were excluding it from its markets. Here is how Tojo explains that the American assertion that Japan was a malignant and global threat – that it had determined to “take over the world” – was, from his perspective, a fiction.

“The causes of the China Incident were the exclusion and insult of Japan throughout China, the exclusion of Japanese goods, the persecution of Japanese residents in China, and the illegal violation of Japanese rights. As Japan had declared on such occasions, it was thought that the stability of East Asia depended on the close, mutual assistance and cooperation between China and Japan. That Japanese troops were stationed in China at the time was the result of unfortunate incidents and not something that Japan had originally desired. Consequently, there would have been no objection to the total withdrawal of troops should the causes be eliminated . . . On the British-American side the causes were seen entirely to be a Japanese policy of invasion, and little thought was given to actual circumstances. The Japanese policy, as was made clear at the time, was a non-expansionist policy, and it was not carried out as a matter of national intent.”

His argument obviously raises questions about the morality of post war “trials” in which victors get to execute the losers. Looked at from the vantage point of 60-70 years, can we not concede that Tojo had some points to make? This document spent some 40 years in obscurity. A generation of people have taken U.S. History courses now without any reference to the Japanese narrative as outlined by Hideki Tojo. Indeed, few students coming out of an American history class in high school will even know that Franklin Deleno Roosevelt cut Japan off from its oil supplies before the Pearl Harbor attack. “It is natural that I should bear entire responsibility for the war in general, and, needless to say, I am prepared to do so,” says Tojo in his diary,

“Consequently, now that the war has been lost, it is presumably necessary that I be judged so that the circumstances of the time can be clarified and the future peace of the world be assured. Therefore, with respect to my trial, it is my intention to speak frankly, according to my recollection, even though when the vanquished stands before the victor, who has over him the power of life and death, he may be apt to toady and flatter. I mean to pay considerable attention to this in my actions, and say to the end that what is true is true and what is false is false. To shade one's words in flattery to the point of untruthfulness would falsify the trial and do incalculable harm to the nation, and great care must be taken to avoid this.”

As students of history and teachers of history, we do not have to agree in entirety with narrative accounts of the people we defeat, but it seems that we owe it to truth and to the future to hear them. How long did it take for Americans to take seriously the account of its treatment of American Indians (as told in Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee)?

Tojo’s journal speaks to us today about our present conflicts. “World peace must be built upon reality and an understanding of the other's position,” he says,

“And can be achieved only by finding means that are acceptable. It is not conducive to negotiations for one country to ignore reality and force its own self righteousness upon another country.”

 

To Tojo, it was America who had fundamentally determined that it wanted to go to war. From his perspective, nothing in the actions that the U.S. took could be seen to be anything but intentional provocation. “It can only be said that the United States, seduced by its own doctrines and selfishness, was planning to expand the war” he writes:

“Although it avoided handling its international relations by means of force, the United States government advanced its harsh claims by applying economic pressure, together with the British government and others. This kind of pressure can, at times, be even more inhumane than military pressure and should be avoided as a means of handling international relations.

In every instance, what the US government demanded of Japan ignored reality in China and attempted to subvert the position of Japan, which was the stabilizing force in East Asia. . . . The above makes it clear that Japan had lost all hope in further negotiation, and was forced to extreme measures as a matter of pure self defense.

“According to the address by the chief of counsel, Japan declared war on civilization, but the responsibility for declaring war lies rather, as explained above, with the AngloAmerican side, which forced Japan into war. Japan fought in order to ensure its own survival and also to establish the proper survival of the people of East Asia. In other words, it sought true civilization for mankind. This truth is not to be judged hastily as the sorrowful lamentations of a vanquished country, for it is the truth of mankind.”

“Japan never planned to wage a war for the purposes of aggression. Japan always tried to establish its independence and self-preservation and self-defense, and tried to counter the instability and turmoil that resulted from European and American aggression in East Asia. Japan tried to stabilize East Asia and believed that this was a contribution to world peace.”

During the trial, Hideki Tojo was apparently asked to explain his position that the war was “made in America”. Here is how he answered.

“Answer: As has already been demonstrated, after the First Great European War, and after the Manchurian Incident, the United States adopted a policy of high tariffs, Britain built up an imperial economic bloc, and Japan's trade was excluded from one part of the world after another.

Further, at the end of July 1939, the United States suddenly applied economic pressure, principally by rescinding its trade and commerce treaty with Japan. This, together with the outrageous act of economic blockade by means of the freezing of Japanese assets by the United States, Britain, and Holland, was a mortal threat to Japan, whose economic activities depended on foreign trade. This kind of economic blockade by nations with which Japan was not in a state of war was felt as an enemy act that was little different from war.”

Source: Reprinted from The Journal of Historical Review, vol. 12, no. 1, pp. 31-85.

http://www.vho.org/GB/Journals/JHR/12/1/Tojo31-85.html

Repetition. Repetion. Repetition. Needless to say, his narrative was not accepted by the court that tried him. It was probably not even heard. Who in their right mind would want to complicate their own narrative when to do so would bring the ego that has created an acceptable version of the story into account?

Nothing in the above should be taken as agreement with Hideki Tojo’s account. Clearly, nothing is as simple as one person’s account of anything. All I am doing here is illustrating a point. People can do some pretty mean things to you and find ways to justify it with a story that declares them to have been simply acting in “self defense” somehow.

Question for Comment: Do you ever catch yourself modifying narratives of your conflicts to suit you?

In the first chapter of the Ethics textbook I have chosen for the class I will be teaching on the subject next Fall, we are introduced to the Ethics of divine will. In thinking about how to cover this topic, it occurred to me that it might be interesting to frame the issues covered in the chapter in the context of the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor who was a key leader in the plot to kill Adolf Hitler. Bonhoeffer was constantly forced to struggle with the ethics of anomalous circumstances. He had a profound belief in the ability of God to speak through traditional scriptures but he never seems to have placed a limit on how that word could take shape.

“The church has three possible ways it can act against the state,” he wrote of his decisions to oppose the Nazi regime.  

“First, it can ask the state if its actions are legitimate. Second, it can aid the victims of the state action. The church has the unconditional obligation to the victims of any order in society even if they do not belong to the Christian society. The third possibility is not just bandage the victims under the wheel, but to jam a spoke in the wheel itself.”

As a member of the conspiracy, he was constantly having to lie about who he was and what he was doing, serving as a double agent. In his letters, he struggles to figure out what God’s will is in his particular circumstances. Like Obediah in the Biblical book of Kings, who was forced to feign allegiance to Jezabel and the god Baal, Bonhoeffer often had to sign his documents with the traditional “Hiel Hitler” even as he sought for ways to assassinate the leader of Germany. “The will of God is not a system of rules established from the outset,” he wrote,

“It is something new and different in each different situation in life. And for this reason a man must forever re-examine what the will of God may be. The will of God may lie deeply concealed beneath a great number of possibilities.”

The day after the failed attempt on Hitler’s life, when Bonhoeffer must have known that he would be executed, he wrote:

"I discovered later, and I'm still discovering right up to this moment, that is it only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith. By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life's duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In so doing we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously, not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world. That, I think, is faith."

Soon after, he was hung. The following is from an interview between and Martin Doblmeier, the director of the documentary. It speaks to the flexibility of Bonhoeffer’s Ethical thought processes, even though he spoke from a deeply set basis of religious conviction:

Ms. Tippett: And that is really where he came out. Isn't it? That you have to be discerning ethical principles and norms, but in the end, you have to do the best you can and throw yourself on the will of God, and that, in this case, I suppose, he felt the will of God calling him to betray what he might have defined as his ethical…

Mr. Doblmeier: Or to rethink his own paradigm. I mean, I think that's the great mystery of God. God is always calling us to rethink our own paradigm. Just at the moment we think we've got the formula kind of figured out, it's the God that's the mysterious God that comes to us to say, "This may not be the way you had quite figured it out." And I think that Bonhoeffer was open to that at all times. I think he was a prayerful man — he searched the scriptures for direction in his life, and I think when he felt as though this is what he had to do — the term that Eberhard Bethge used was that Dietrich took over the guilt of killing and being part of the plots to kill Adolf Hitler.

Speaking of Faith with Krista Tippet

http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/bonhoeffer/transcript.shtml 

Question for Comment: Do you ever trust your ethical intuitions when they encourage you to take some action that does not seem in accordance with the ethical system you have spent years constructing?

Two [denominations], both alike in dignity,
In fair [Ireland], where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life;
Whole misadventured piteous overthrows
Do with their death bury their parents' strife.

Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (revised)

 

Romeo and Julliet, take 48. Then add children and the Catholic Church.

A Love Divided tells another common story of Cupidian nearsightedness. Two people from groups that have yet to settle an ancient theological war fall in love. They swear that they will form a union impervious to the communities they belong to and the pressures those communities will bring to bear on them. But then … reality descends.   

The movie, A Love Divided, is based on a true story of Mary and Sean Cloney, she a Protestant, he a Catholic, both from the Irish town of Fethard-on-Sea. When they were married in 1949, they married each other in a Protestant Church and a Catholic Church. At the time, the Catholic Church required Mary to sign a pledge in order to marry her husband in the Catholic Church that the children would be raised in the Catholic Church as Catholics and at the time, this involved sending them to a Catholic School. The Ne Temere Declaration (literally, “Not rashly”) enabled Catholic priests to determine whether they would or would not marry couples of interfaith backgrounds and to require pledges of the couple before they would. The State courts in Ireland backed up these commitments as legal and for a woman who married a Catholic man and made such an oath, a change of mind might have been regarded with the same perspective as one who took out a mortgage and then decided they did not wish to pay it.

Interestingly, the director of this movie has chosen to film the commitment that the husband made to the wife to let nothing come between them but has chosen NOT to film the commitment that she made to him previously to the effect that their children would be raised Catholic. I tend to think this decision affects much of the way the veiwer sees the rest of the story. "History will be kind to me," Winston churchill once said, "for I intend to write it."

In emotional terms, this movie clearly favor’s the mother’s position. She elicited a verbal agreement from her husband after they were married in the church but before they slept together that he and she would form the principle bond together and that no outside force would come between them. When her daughter was of school age and was to be enrolled, she began to second guess the commitment that she had made to her husband and her husband’s church. And when she did that, he began to second guess the commitment that he had made to her.  You might think of it as an ethical stalemate. I was not there but it would seem from the movie that she backed out of a commitment first and the commitment she backed out on was in writing (I am not sure ethically whether that makes a difference but from a legal perspective, she was in the wrong).

From a purely ethical perspective, it is an interesting question, or series of questions. Did the Catholic Church have a right or a moral obligation to obligate people that asked for the rights of Catholic marriage for such a commitment? Clearly, given the church’s teaching, a priest might not wish to collaborate in the forming of unions that might lead to the “breeding of apostates”. Does a spouse that has made a commitment about the raising of children before having children have an obligation to that commitment regardless of their change of perspective after? Do the best interests of the children trump the commitments that were made about them previously? When this man found himself between the horns of a commitment made to his wife and a commitment made to his church, is it altogether clear that it is the commitment to the church that must be sacrificed? Which is the primary or more sacred institution? Is the family, the principle institution to which any human being belongs? Or is it to the spiritual community? Clearly, this movie takes the position that family bonds are deeper and more sacred than ecclesiastical bonds.

I suspect that the Catholic Church might think otherwise? Where its principle source of authority (the words of Jesus in the New Testament) are clear on the subject, they seem to lean in the direction of the church. But I suspect that the prevailing view is that nothing trumps the love of a mother for her children. Not even a father's love.

This movie also raises issues of the ethics of child custody. When the couple separates, Mary Cloney takes the children without the consultation of her husband or the permission of the State. She is, for all intents and purposes, kidnapping the children. The movie absolutely favors her decision and redeems her in the viewer’s eyes by highlighting her love for her children and her care for their well being. All I will say here is that if you have ever been a father whose children were taken away, you would understand that no amount of soft music played in the background can comfort you in your pain. Whether your separation from your children is done legally or illegally, you will never be able to watch a movie like this and feel completely free to celebrate Mary Cloney’s decision.

[Note: I thought the scene where the father expresses his anger by loading up a shotgun to shoot his estranged wife's horse, immediately followed by his sobbing inton article of his children's clothing was a perfect portrayal of the civil war between instinctual rage and instinctual attachment.]

One of the unfortunate things that often happens when a movie is made from a series of real events, is that certain distortions will be introduced to heighten the dramatic tension. I always find it interesting to go try and discover what those alterations are. In this particular case, it appears that the Catholic Church’s decision to boycott the Protestants in town was not accompanied, in real life as in the movie, by the use of sanctioned violence. According to Mary and Sean’s daughter, Eileen, the real Sean Cloney was pleased to see the movie released before he died but that he thought there were historical inaccuracies in it. She explains,

"He did make some public comment about where the film had misrepresented some historical points such as the burning of my grandfather Tom Kelly's farm and the physical violence involving sticks and guns. These events did not happen."

As it turns out, it seems as though the Catholics of the town were legitimately concerned that a man from their community had had his children “abducted”. No doubt, they also felt that this act had been done in violation of a commitment that this man’s wife had made to him. Legally, morally, ethically, they thought themselves to be favoring the “right” side of the conflict and must have been convinced that collective action was the only action that was left to them as a means of expressing their compassionate support for his pain. In hindsight, as we watch the movie, we must remember that we are getting to see who is innocent and who is not. The people in the events themselves would not have been thus informed. They suspected that the Protestants of colluding with the mother and, as it turns out, they were in some respects, right.

Eileen writes of her and her sister’s return to the town in the following way:

"That was a strange time for us. We didn't know many of the children in the village or the people in the surrounding areas when we were growing up because we didn't go to school so it was quite traumatic for us.

"But the local people received us with gentleness and encouragement and soon we were part of the community. This was all we hoped for and it was wonderful.

"Mary and I got married and stayed in the local area and brought up our children. Neither of us went to church.

"I suppose we could have gone with Daddy one Sunday and our mother the next to make it even. But instead our parents opted to leave us at home.

"I think they decided on the action which would draw the least attention and they didn't want one church to win over the other.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4161/is_19991205/ai_n14497602/?tag=content;col1

Let me say up front that I am not a Catholic and that I am not always a fan of all things that Catholics have done in the History of the church and the world. Indeed, Bishop Brendan Comiskey, who was to apologize for the Cloney boycott some 41 years later, was himself asked to step down from office by his church for having failed to take appropriate measures against a local priest who was also a practicing pedophile (The priest had been charged with some 70 counts of sexual abuse and committed suicide before his trial. Ironically, Sean Cloney was one of those who testified to being a victim). But still, I tend to think that the Catholic Church and its members were ill used in this movie. If the local town Catholics HAD beaten people up, thrown rocks through windows, and generally behaved like Hitler’s SA (brownshirts) or the KKK, then fine. Portray them that way in a movie. But, if they didn’t, have not the movie’s directors stepped over a line from “poetic license” to slander?

Or is it just that the Catholic Church is to be regarded as a target so worthy of criticism for other things that it is perfectly fair to make them look worse than they were. Playing soft Celtic music in the background while you manipulate history to identify who the villain and who the heroine in a given story is, is disingenuous in my opinion. In a movie that purports to take a strong ethical position, the directors have made use of unethical means. The fact is that the conflict between Sean and Mary Cloney was a complicated one and not entirely without some villainy on all sides. And it is my opinion that the case is being manipulated in the movie to further damage public perception of organized religion. The Catholic Prime Minister of Ireland, Eamon De Velera, at the time had this to say of the case:

“I can only say, from what has appeared in public, that I regard this boycott as ill-conceived, ill-considered and futile for the achievement of the purpose for which it seems to have been intended; that I regard it as unjust and cruel to confound the innocent with the guilty; that I repudiate any suggestion that this boycott is typical of the attitude or conduct of our people; that I am convinced that ninety per cent of them look on this matter as I do.”

In the movie, it is ONLY the atheist pub owner who dissents from the boycott declared by the Church. One gets no sense that there were any Catholics in town or country that defied it or even spoke ill of it.They seem to all have determined to goosestep in line with their local priest.

Ireland regarded itself as a Catholic State. It’s courts were completely consistent when they determined to hold Protestants to their written oaths. Judge Gavan Duffy, in his decision in the 1952 case, Tilson v. Tilson made the point clear.

"In my opinion, an order of the court designed to secure the fulfilment of an agreement peremptorily required before a mixed marriage by the Church, whose special position in Ireland is officially recognised as the guardian of the faith of the Catholic spouse, cannot be withheld on any ground of public policy by the very State which pays homage to that Church." Irish Law Times Report LXXXVI 1952, pages 49-73

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ne_Temere

The date of the Tilson case in Ireland is significant coming some five or six years before the blow up between the Cloneys. This issue of where their girls were going to go to school was not something that should have been left undiscussed until the week before the decision. There was ample time to see this one coming. But we humans are excellent at postponing discussions about things we see coming if we know that they cannot be resolved amicably.

I cannot judge them.

But I envy this family. They were given a chance to stay together and they took it. As Sean's friend advises him, "Love's too precious and life’s too long without it."

P.S. This movie constantly returns to the music of the song Ae Fond Kiss by Robert Burns, linking this movie and the movie Ae Fond Kiss that I reviewed a few days ago in an unmistakable sympathetic link. One is about an Irish Catholic woman and a Muslim man. the other is about an Irish Catholic man and a Protestant woman. I think in both cases, the point is clear: If you are going to commit yourself to a life with someone of a different faith, you have a lot more talking to do before you make your decision than you think you do.

Question for Comment: I wonder if anyone has ever written a textbook on the ethics of promises and commitments? Would the principle chapter simply say "Never make them"?

Last night I watched King Lear for the first time and realized how altered my interpretations were when comparing the ones that I derived from reading the play with the ones I derived from watching it. It does certainly seem that human beings rarely do well with changes that come upon them too fast. In the play King Lear, the king, perhaps unwisely does a number of foolish things, and among them is this: He fails to take into consideration the human need for transition time. Think for a moment of the different transitions that everyone in this family is forced to undergo in the matter of a day or two.

An entire kingdom is forced to make a transition from one authority to another. King Lear must make a transition from one position of status to a very different position of status, as do his knights, daughters, and sons-in-law. Lear also makes the transition from employment to unemployment, sanity to senility, respect to dependency, and parental authority to impotency. These shifts in the tectonic plates of his own life affect every other character in the play. Upon his refusal to be the same person he has always been, everyone else in the entire family and cabinet has to make their own tectonic adjustments.

And what happens? I think what happens is that everyone goes a bit insane, starting with Lear. Everyone has been forced to process more – more grief - more responsibility – more emotion- more conflict – more buried “stuff” than their brains can handle. Lear has opened up a window of change that dislodges so many aspects of “the status quo” that many decisions are made that would have been best left unmade until people were ready. Be comforted madam, the great rage you see is killed in him” says Lear’s doctor as Lear comes to his senses again. But the ripple effects of his insanity continue to spread in the lives of those affected.

Again, everything happens too fast for the humans in this story to assimilate. All of a sudden, the king has decided to split his entire kingdom. No one is prepared for how he plans to do so. All of a sudden, King Lear’s favorite daughter is dispossessed (“When she was dear to us we did hold her so but now her price has fallen.”). All of a sudden, King Lear goes from being a person who his knights must fear to a person they have no cause to fear. All of a sudden, Lear goes from benefactor to dependent. All of a sudden, Cordelia goes from being the fiancé of one noble to the fiancé of another. All of a sudden people in favor find themselves out of it and people out of it, find themselves in. All of a sudden, husbands find that their wives do not love them (“My fool usurps my body” says Goneril of her husband). All of a sudden, sons find that their fathers do not trust them. All of a sudden fathers find that their children do not respect them. “Grief hath crazed my wits,” says Gloucester. Too many people have suffered too much loss or too much gain too quickly. Everything is chaos. Lear’s impulsive irrationality threatens to uncover all sorts of realities that have lived in a comfortable hiding. “He hath ever but slenderly known himself” says Lear’s daughter, Regan. But in truth, they will all discover the same of themselves. “Everything changes when everything changes” you might say, “and everyone is in for some surprises.” Everyone, it appears, is much more (or less) than their “outwall” as Kent puts it.

I began this train of thought by saying that the insanity that so much of the play, King Lear, is focused on, is the result of rapid changes in the demands that have been placed the humans, their intellects, and their emotions. Change. Rapid change. Change that you are not prepared for. “In that way madness lies. Let me shun that. No more of that,” says Lear.  “No more of that.”

Question for Comment: Have you ever had to deal with a massive life change that you were not in the least prepared for? How did it affect you? Those around you?  

“One of the interests of life for Lester was the uncertainty about who was to be his mental companion for any given day.  It seemed to be something over which he had no control.” Dorothy Canfield Fisher, the Homemaker

In Marital Relations, an article written for the Los Angeles Times by Vermonter, Dorothy Canfield Fisher in 1924, the author made the argument that she amply illustrated in her novel The Homemaker, explicit. I quote from the article at length.

“One thing we ought to realize about marriage is, first of all, that, like every other human relationship, it is a problem that is never completely solved and settled, once and for all, until both parties are dead and buried.  And secondly, that it is an intensely personal affair and that nobody on earth can know as much about it as the two people involved.  Consequently, advice and pressure from the outside are always given on the basis of insufficient information, and have at least a 50-50 chance of being wrong.

If there is one single human relationship which more than any other cannot be run from the outside, it is the institution of marriage.  There is no other which demand so inexorably from the people involved strength of character, intelligence and magnanimity, because, in the nature of things, the only strength of character, intelligence and magnanimity which can do married people any good is their own. . . .

So that the best advice to give boys and girls about how to succeed in marriage is not marry early or late, or to take out blondes or brunettes, or to keep house or have a paid job; but to tell them from our hearts that the only thing that will help them to make a success of marriage is to grow up strong and wise and brave and gentle as possible, to use their own intelligence and have the courage of their own convictions. . . .

There is a priceless service we can, every one of us, render to married people, which if conscientiously performed, would cure at least half the difficulties traditionally blamed on the institution of marriage.

What is this service?  What could we do for them that would help them so greatly?  We could let them alone; we could let them, without comment or blame, construct the sort of marriage which fits their particular case, rather than the sort which fits our ideas.  We could leave them to struggle with a problem which, under the best circumstances, requires all their intelligence to solve, without crushing them under the weight of half-baked certainties and misquotations…”

We could realize that every human being is different from every other, and hence each couple of human beings is different from every other couple: and, within the limits of possibility and decency we should leave people free to construct a sort of marriage that is best for their particular combination.

Don't we do this already?  We do not.  Not by a longshot.  We have certain fixed convictions about which we are as intolerant as Spanish inquisitors.  A part of us have the fixed conviction that the proper pattern for a marriage is a house in a suburb, with a lawn in front, a furnace in the cellar, doilies on the polished dining room table, and some car better than a Ford in the garage.  This collection of objects is to be kept in order by a woman with long hair who spends most of her days in the home, and paid for by a man with short hair who lives most of his time out of it.

 According to what we may call section One of humanity, this is a successful marriage, and section One penalizes any departure from it by vigorous this appropriation, by social ostracism, by hurting the children's feelings, by any low-down means it can lay its hands too.

Section Two of humanity, observing the tyranny of section One, disapproves, not of the tyranny (although it thinks it does) but of the particular mold which Section One is trying to force on marriage.  Section Two, therefore shouts out loudly that the only self-respecting combination for two modern human beings is for both of them to be shorthaired and latchkey, and for both of them to work outside the home, leaving the children to specially trained experts, to pay whom the shorthaired parents work in offices like decent 20th-century folk”

There is not, so far as my ear can detect, even one small still voice to be heard saying, ‘Don't believe implicitly what anybody tells you about how to manage your marriage.  Use your own sense to see what kind of woman you are, what kind of man you have married, what is the best, possible relationship attainable between you, what is the best sort of life you can arrange together out of the materials handed down to you by your ancestors and laid before you buy the 20th Century in which you live. . . . “

There is only one possible standard by which to judge any marriage.  If man and woman manage to construct with their children a life in common which keeps them reasonably happy, healthy, good and strong, with a permanent affection for each other, they have made a successful marriage, no matter by which sort of pattern.  If they fail in this, their marriage has been more or less a failure.” 

What Fisher does in the novel The Homemaker is to give the reader an experience of something that they may not have seen in real life: A man who is a better homemaker than his wife. A wife who is a better breadwinner than her husband, and a narrative events that allows them to find their own personal happiness in letting each other be who they are. One must remember of course that the book was written in 1924 and that at the time, it would have seemed more radical than what it appears to us to be today.

Here is how Fisher describes the mother, Evangeline, in the beginning of this story:

“A profound depression came upon her.  These were the moments in the mother's life about which nobody ever warned you, about which everybody kept a deceitful silence, the fine books and the speakers who had so much to say about the sacredness of maternity.  They never told you that there were moments of air in clear sight and you saw helplessly future children would never measure up to your standard, never would be really close to you, because they were not your kind of human beings, because they were not your children, but merely other human beings for whom you were responsible.  How solitary it made you feel!”

Meanwhile, here is how this woman’s husband, Lester, feels about his lot in life, going in every day to sell people things in a department store when he believes in his heart that people really need poetry far more than they need things.

“Stephen [their son – a lad who appears to have many of the symptoms of autism) had been on the point of saying something to him, something human, Stephen and never asked a question or made an advanced toward anyone, Stephen who lived in a state of moral siege, making sorties from his stronghold only to harry the enemy.  And the accursed matter of punctuality had once more frozen out a human relationship.  He never had time to know his children, to stalk and catch that exquisitely elusive bird of paradise, their confidence.  Lester had long ago given up any hope of having time enough to do other things that seemed worthwhile, to read the books he liked, to meditate, to try to understand anything.  But it did seem that in the matter of his own children . . .”

 “If he felt any real sympathy for his own children, he'd somehow get more money to give them.  What were fathers for, if not for that?  If he were a ‘man among men,’ he would do as other manly men did: use his wits to force the mothers of other children to spend more money than they ought on material possessions and thus have that money to spend in giving more material possessions to his own. .  . .  a father who had only love and no money -- the sooner he was out of the way the better.  He had that unquestioned axiom ground into every bleeding fiber of his heart. ”

In the unfolding of this story, the reader is given to understand how profoundly better it is for children when their parents get to play the roles they were created for, not as members of genders but as individuals. Here is Evangeline and Lester’s daughter speaking of her new found relationship with her father, the homemaker, now “forced” by an accident that paralyzed him to be the homemaker.

“She came to feel that talking to father, when they were alone together, was almost like thinking aloud, only better, because there was somebody to help you figure things out when you got yourself all balled up.  Before this Helen had spent a great deal of time trying to figure things out by herself, and getting so tangled that she didn't know where she had begun over how to stop the wild world racing around in her head.  But now, with father to hang on to, she could unravel those twisted skeins of thought and wind them into balls where she could get at them.”

And here is Lester commenting on what he likes about his work in the home:

“One of the most embittering elements of Lester's old life had been the absence of any leisure when he could really think -- consider things consecutively enough to make any sort of sense out of them.  He seemed to himself to live perpetually in the mental attitude of a man with his watch in one hand and a heavy valise in the other running for a train which was already overdue.  How much value with the judgment of such a man have?

He had always thought he would like to be able to sit right down quietly to think out a thing or two.  Now he certainly had all the sitting down quietly that anybody could want.  Well, he liked it as much as he thought he would.  And more!  He brought under his consideration one after another of the new elements of his new life, holding them firmly under the lens of his intelligence, focusing on them all his attention, and to his astonished release saw them one by one yield to his analysis, give up their tortured, baffling aspect of mystery and tragedy, and lie open to his view, open to his hand, open to his forward-looking planning.  He had never lived with his family before, he'd never seen more of their lives than the inexplicable and tangled loose ends over which they all stumbled wretchedly.  Now that for months he had the opportunity for continuous observation, he perceived that there was nothing so darkly inexplicable, after all, nothing that resisted a patient, resourceful attempt to follow up loose ends and straighten out some of the knots. . . . “you could put through the job of bringing up children.  No amount of energy on your part, no, not if you set up all night every night of your life, could ever read by a single instant the slow unfolding from within and of the child's nature. . . .”

One sees clearly that the children each needed what he had to offer more than they needed the nutrients their mother supplied. She however is a perfect match for the needs that Lester’s former employer had. When his injury begins to heal, it terrifies him that society may force him to again switch places with his wife (as she is similarly terrified). He longs for social permission to be a full time father and home-maker for his family. But …

 “He knew that from the beginning of time everything had been arranged to make that impossible.  Every unit in the whole of society would join in making it impossible, for the Ladies Guild to the children in public schools.  It would be easier for him to commit murder or rob a bank than to give his intelligence where was most needed, in his own home with his children

“What is your husband's business?” Mrs. Knapp?

:He hasn't any.  He stays at home and keeps house.”

“Oh…”

“He heard that “Oh” reverberating infernally down every nook he tried.”

“My papa is an insurance agent.  What is your pop to do for a living, Helen?”

“He doesn't do anything.  Mother makes a living.  Father stays home with us children.”

“Oh! Is he sick?”

“No, he's not sick.”

“Oh. . . .”

. . . over his head tradition swung a bludgeon he knew he could not parry.  He always guessed at the presence of that Tradition ruling the world, guessed that it hated him, guessed at its real name.  He knew now what it decreed: That men are in the world to get possessions, to create material things, to sell them, to buy them, to transport them, above all to stimulate to fever heat, the desire for them in all human beings.  It decreed that men are of worth in so far as they achieve that sort of material success, and worthless if they do not.”

He refers to the social pressures driving him back to work as “the bludgeon and the snarl” and determines that if he must be disabled to be given social permission to continue living life as he saw fit, and to allow his wife to do the same, then it would just be better to live his life out in a wheel chair even if he didn’t need it. He would rather be physically disabled than spiritually mis-occupied.

“Among the oppressed are many who would like to oppress” Napoleon once said. Dorothy Canfield Fisher has made an eloquent argument for domestic freedom here and one which affirms the beauty and the dignity, and the vital importance that homemakers play in the lives of children, whatever their gender.

Question for Comment: Do you like the role that you have been assigned to play in your present family? Did your parents like their respective roles? Are you committed to giving your children the freedom to find the ones that fit them?

My Vermont History class has led me into a reading of selected letters of Dorothy Canfield Fisher tonight. I am finding that I so often get to know a person so much better reading their letters as opposed to reading their biographies.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher was named after the main character of George Elliot’s novel Middlemarch I discovered. How appropriate. In her many novels, she attempted to create characters and stories that reflected her perception of real life, “No good is ever done,” she wrote in one of her letters,

“by pretending that anything is different from what it really is, either by our explicit statement or by implication. The prettifying of human relations in conventional, old-fashioned, 19th century fiction, was responsible for some ghastly shocks, when the readers of those pleasant books came up, in real life, against something which the novels they had read had led them to assume did not exist.”

She also developed a writing style that allowed the reader to supply interpretations of a character’s acts.

"I have tried to make a glass door through which the reader looks into the heart and mind of one and another of the men, women, and children in the story so that once and for all, he knows what sort of human being is there. From that time on it has been my intention to leave the reader to interpret for himself the meaning of the actions of that character without the traditional explanations and reiterated indications from the author"

It is interesting that this is literally what our brains do when they hear a sound. It is the very first strike of the sound that determines how we will hear the rest of it. See THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON MUSIC.

I think one of my favorite letters was in regard to her engagement to her future husband, John Fisher. “I cannot write to you all that I feel,” she wrote a friend,

“I can only tell you, in so many words, that I am engaged—and that my happiness would be perfect if you were here! I really don't know too well how it all happened. I am accustomed to living in a world of letters, telegrams and unexpected visits. Yes, people have come all the way from New York to Vermont, and the village has been electrified several times by gentlemen from New York who asked the way to the Canfield house. I would step out from the children’s room to be greeted by a man—serious, angry, composed or well disposed—as the case might be, until it all seemed quite comical, since my nerves were so tense. You know how I always have control over myself and how proud I am to be like that. Well, perhaps all this emotion was necessary to break the walls down and show me I am completely in love with the John Fisher I talked about last summer. I remember now that you said to me, with that keenness of character analysis which always fills me with admiration, “He is the one I like best and who would be the best for you.” However, one would not say at first glance that we were made for each other. He is the football champion I talked to you about, the idol of the University’s athletic field. But he is much more than that—he is the most intelligent in matters of literature of all the men I know, the most sensitive in the area of art, and the best of men from the point or view of his character. He is as my brother is: so, there are two men of noble character in this world—at least two—and I feel optimistic these days that I  have fewer doubts about the rest of humanity than I had in the past. . . .

. . .  he has a good position in a kind of “literary office” which is well established, where he will probably have a good deal of opportunity for advancement: but all that will develop very slowly and it is more than likely that I shall be engaged for a very long time! That pleases me enormously for, even now, in the midst of so much happiness flowing about me each instant like a golden river—even now, I have a kind of fear when I think of marriage. John tells me gaily that he worked for two years to get me accustomed to the idea of being engaged, and that now he is going to change his tune and get me accustomed to the idea of being married. But all the same, even writing these words makes my heart beat faster. John says again and again, with his endless patience, “But see here, what is the trouble with you? You are not merely going to get married, which in itself would be moving, but you are going to marry me, which is the most natural thing in the world.” I don't know—that feeling will come in due time, without doubt. I can't think of life going on without john—he has become indispensable, he is so gentle, so strong, with an affection so unbelievably good and necessary. but I am happy to have a lot of time to get accustomed to the idea of marriage.”

My son and I finished listening to Roald Dahl’s autobiography, Boy today. It would be a bummer to feel like one had to be beaten to a pulp in a British boarding school to feel one’s life worthy of an auto-biography but never-the-less, one does get the sense that Dahl learned not to be crushed by suffering by means of these experiences. “Unless you have been to boarding-school when you are very young,” he says, “it is absolutely impossible to appreciate the delights of living at home.”

I often say to students that there are many ways to be wealthy and many ways to be poor. It is entirely possible to be money wealthy and relationship poor, or real estate wealthy and intelligence poor, or pension rich and health poor, or family rich and income poor, or savings rich and experiences poor, or hope rich and memory poor, or memory rich and hope poor.

Roald Dahl was a man who was talent rich and memory rich and in the end, was able to convert these things into being money rich and friend rich and altruism wealthy. His life did not come without tragedy. He lost children. He had his injuries. But maybe there is something in his story about how his father broke his arm and a drunk doctor so botched the treatment that it had to be amputated that taught him that being limb poor is not as bad as being confidence poor.

It was a good story to have in my son and I’s conversation vocabulary together. If you can stand stories about kids being beaten, it’s a fun one.

Question for comment: Would you like to be more memory wealthy? How might you change yourlife to make it happen?