One of the first committees I was asked to be on at Twin Cities Friends Meeting, was to address concerns about care of the meetinghouse. The problem was that the meeting couldn't get enough people to serve on the committees responsible for the physical plant, and the long-serving members who had led those committees were aging out of their ability to handle everything themselves. One of the questions we asked early on was how we could bring a sense of spiritual life to the mundane issues of physical plant maintenance.
There are plenty of traditions in which spiritual practice is bound up with work. In some traditions, prayers are counted out along with repetitious labor. In others, focused concentration on a task is used as a way to remove distraction from worldly concerns. Christian monastic traditions engage their followers in work—hard work—as part of their humble duties to God.
We aren't monks, and the work in question was not made of boring, iterative tasks like planting or wall-building. It was things like fixing the toilet and maintaining the furnace, making sure the building was vacuumed and the walks shoveled and the grass mowed.
Where we ended up, was that we wanted to emphasize a sense of "stewardship," that this was not just one more job in our daily lives, but care for a space that was built collectively for the benefit of a greater whole. This was in contrast to emphasizing "property," the value of which is worldly wealth. Stewardship suggests that we are caretakers rather than owners—a steward is not the owner of an estate, but the manager on behalf of the owner, whose job is to make the property do what the owner wants. If we regard the assets of the Meeting as in our care rather than in our keeping, the sense was, it will give that care a greater sense of spirit-led purpose.
There has been a lot of talk about wealth recently in the public sphere. The Occupy movement uses the "99%" and the "1%" as rallying points, noting an increasing concentration of wealth over the past few decades. Conservative commentators, in turn, argue that we ought to be able to enjoy what we earn—that communist redistribution ends up sapping the initiative out of an economy.
The piece I keep thinking is being left out is the matter of inheritance. Not in the broad collective sense liberals like to trot out ("what kind of a world are we leaving our children"), although that is of course important. What I keep wondering about is specifically what parents leave to their children.
Now, I have been the beneficiary of lots of generous inheritance. My mother's parents effectively paid my way through high school and college, and the inheritances from my grandmother and my wife's grandmother made the bulk of the down-payment on our house. When I've gotten myself into sticky financial spots over the years, especially in my first ten years out of college, my parents bailed me out… nothing mind-boggling, but help that got me more quickly over bad decisions. I'm very grateful for these inheritances, and even more so as I now find myself in the position of parent.
As a father, I so want to "be there" for my son. I want to give him all I can. At the same time, I don't want to spoil him, or have him never learn form not getting what he wants. And he doesn't always get what he wants, as he will be happy to tell you.
I think the question of how to bequeath to my child goes back to the question we were asking in the Meetinghouse Care committee. Is what I am giving my child his property for him to work his will upon, or is it something he needs to take care of? To invoke stewardship doesn't necessarily affect inequality of inheritance—the sense of stewardship is a long-running theme among large land-owners in England, for instance. But when it's brought together with questions of collective versus individual ownership, it affects how we go about transferring wealth to the next generation. Is that transfer for the benefit of our child or for the continued health of the stewarded property?
A lot of our fears for our children come about because we don't trust the collective community to care for individuals. We have to care for them ourselves while we can, and train them up to take care of themselves. We wish we could do otherwise, that we could let them rest in the arms of the whole, but we don't. Some of us live in smaller communities that have some of that trust—religious communities especially, in this country, but also communities like those that came together out of the gay community in the AIDS horrors of the 1980's and 1990's.
If it came down to it, in a collapse of civilization, we'd find and make communities. Mad Max aside, we have the basis for real support and care in times of need already. In my own life, the morris dancing community, meeting, my work community, my family, and my neighbors (well, some of my neighbors) would form webs of care. We'd do what we could for each other.
But we as a nation do not trust the nation, or even our individual states, to provide that network. We depend on that national framework to hold up our economy: we have a common, nationally determined currency and laws that form the basis for most of our work outside the home. But it's clear from the way politics are headed that we simply don't want to trust our lives to this nation. There is something in that collective we do not want to give to our children.
Is it racism? Classism? Culturalism? Some unholy mixture of all our group-identity-based biases? A lot of my friends would tell you yes, that is the fundamental problem. And I agree they are problems. But they all run up against the question of personal inheritance: when we give our child this package, it includes everything, warts and all.
When we look at what we give our children in terms of fungible value—give them liquid assets so they have the freedom to do what they can with it—without also looking at the thing we are giving into their care as a thing that needs care in and of itself, we are also giving them the idea that fungible value is what is important in a thing. In short: when we give our children freedom, we also give them the false idea that they are free from responsibility.
On the other hand, too many wealthy parents give their children specific, non-liquid inheritances that those children simply aren't fitted to: children who drive their parents' company into the ground, who don't care about the old house and let it rot, who don't want to take care of that stupid artwork... Or who understand the value in these things but don't really carry it in their hearts, and so lose their souls in what their parents or grandparents acquired. They own but they do not love.
I don't see an instant way out of this knot, except that we need to rethink what it means to leave things to our children.
Showing posts with label class. Show all posts
Showing posts with label class. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 21, 2011
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
Formality and Familiarity
[my apologies if this post is a bit of a dog's breakfast; I've spent too much time fussing over it. It probably should have been parsed out into a couple different posts. But there you are.]
It occurred to me, a few weeks ago, that maps are like a collective voice—the voice of a group—in the same way that all published second-person information are. One individual (or more likely, a small group) composes the material, with the idea that "anyone" (that is, anyone with understanding of the particular formal visual or text system) can fit themselves into the pilot's seat and bake that bread or find that highway. In a sense all communication creates a community, in that it means that more then one person has the same information, and this sort of communication is a subset of that.
Maps, recipes and other anonymous second-person communications also act as guides within a larger system. They are formal, though they may be couched in friendly, casual voice: you can make a handwritten-text map, or (as with Julia Child or Laurie Colwin) frame recipes with chatty, informal prose. But Julia Child and your local cartographer do not know anything about you personally. All they know is that you, their target audience, desire to learn to cook the things they describe, or to learn what you have to say about geographic space. As maker of a cookbook/map, you need to compose instructions that can be used by a cook in a small kitchen in Boston or a cabin in Montana, by a motorcyclist or Hummer driver,
BUT: the maker of s standard street map is NOT making their map for people trying to walk or drive cattle. One could say that cattle drivers are excluded. Much has been made of classist, racist, sexist, nationalist etc. exclusion from cartography. And the same thing could be said for Julia Child. You need a motor vehicle to really use a modern road map properly, and you need a kitchen to use a modern cookbook: there are basic tools that the cookbook and street map presume you will have.
But besides excluding, these tools also welcome in. They make it possible to join in a community—indeed they form that community—without first passing a human-administered sniff test: there is no catechism, no manners to learn, no bloodline to prove. This was Julia Child's genius: you don't have to have an outrageous French accent to cook good French food; you just have to understand the system. So the matter of exclusion becomes a matter either of personal economics (can't use that navigational chart... don't own a boat...), or a matter of choice (why would I want to cook French food? Can't stand the stuff).
---
I'm writing this on the Amtrak train down to Portland from Seattle. The train staff are settled in seats behind us, where they are chatting and griping about their jobs. When they make announcements, there is a forced informality to their patter: they are trying very hard to simultaneously sound professional and friendly. The divide between formality and familiarity is, as in much of American public life, confused.
I grew up in this informal American social environment. A lot of it is about denial of class divides: it is not OK in much of this country to set yourself above other fellow Americans (illegal immigrants are another matter). I find even the now-much-reduced sense of formality in Europe disconcerting, and I know Europeans find themselves disconcerted by American "friendliness."
But friendliness is not the same as familiarity. One may give a highly formal greeting that nonetheless makes the visitor very welcome, and one can be laid-back and rudely unwelcoming.
In an odd way, formality can be more friendly, especially where there is a divide in familiar social customs. The word "familiar" comes from the same root as "family" and implies a habitual rather than consciously learned set of behaviors. Where these habits are not ingrained, being plunged into a casual social situation can be very very awkward: rules are not spelled out, and in the everyday business of eating, going to the toilet, and simply sitting and relaxing, feelings are likely to be hurt.
But, of course, formality can be off-putting. I did not like the whole be-on-your-best-manners part of visiting my maternal grandparents. The silverware, the posture, the careful wordings... and in retrospect they were not that bad at all, pretty tolerant and gently corrective to their grandson.
The difference between formality as welcome and formality as barrier is in whether the formal system permits access to the habitual. A street map allows one to discover a network, but that same network can be learned (think new cabbies with their nose in the street atlas vs. old-timers who know the city streets by heart).
Where formality is destructive is where there is no gateway through to familiarity: Eliza Doolittle could learn to be a lady, but unless her Pakistani modern-day counterpart is truly judged by her habits, speech and carriage, her skin color will forever bar her. You can be as polite as you want to awful old Great-aunt Phyllis, but she will never let you see her heart, or see you as you are.
And where maps truly do provide a barrier, they too are a problem: where they are used to create ghettoes and bantustans and reservations, to clearly and unequivocally state that this sort of person will only be allowed here and here, to rationalize and clarify violent systems.
They are also a bar where formality becomes its own ingrained habit. This is the class bar: when you have grown up used to formal habits, you have an inherent, and unfair, social advantage over those who have had to learn the formal system, and for whom it will always be a foreign language.
My own take-home for this is that it is always best that a formal system like cartography remain a foreign language to all who use it; one may become fluent, but if it becomes the language in which you relax in your pajamas, then you need in a sense to recuse yourself from using it as a tool for power. You become a host, and ought not really claim this common land of formal systems as territory.
It occurred to me, a few weeks ago, that maps are like a collective voice—the voice of a group—in the same way that all published second-person information are. One individual (or more likely, a small group) composes the material, with the idea that "anyone" (that is, anyone with understanding of the particular formal visual or text system) can fit themselves into the pilot's seat and bake that bread or find that highway. In a sense all communication creates a community, in that it means that more then one person has the same information, and this sort of communication is a subset of that.
Maps, recipes and other anonymous second-person communications also act as guides within a larger system. They are formal, though they may be couched in friendly, casual voice: you can make a handwritten-text map, or (as with Julia Child or Laurie Colwin) frame recipes with chatty, informal prose. But Julia Child and your local cartographer do not know anything about you personally. All they know is that you, their target audience, desire to learn to cook the things they describe, or to learn what you have to say about geographic space. As maker of a cookbook/map, you need to compose instructions that can be used by a cook in a small kitchen in Boston or a cabin in Montana, by a motorcyclist or Hummer driver,
BUT: the maker of s standard street map is NOT making their map for people trying to walk or drive cattle. One could say that cattle drivers are excluded. Much has been made of classist, racist, sexist, nationalist etc. exclusion from cartography. And the same thing could be said for Julia Child. You need a motor vehicle to really use a modern road map properly, and you need a kitchen to use a modern cookbook: there are basic tools that the cookbook and street map presume you will have.
But besides excluding, these tools also welcome in. They make it possible to join in a community—indeed they form that community—without first passing a human-administered sniff test: there is no catechism, no manners to learn, no bloodline to prove. This was Julia Child's genius: you don't have to have an outrageous French accent to cook good French food; you just have to understand the system. So the matter of exclusion becomes a matter either of personal economics (can't use that navigational chart... don't own a boat...), or a matter of choice (why would I want to cook French food? Can't stand the stuff).
---
I'm writing this on the Amtrak train down to Portland from Seattle. The train staff are settled in seats behind us, where they are chatting and griping about their jobs. When they make announcements, there is a forced informality to their patter: they are trying very hard to simultaneously sound professional and friendly. The divide between formality and familiarity is, as in much of American public life, confused.
I grew up in this informal American social environment. A lot of it is about denial of class divides: it is not OK in much of this country to set yourself above other fellow Americans (illegal immigrants are another matter). I find even the now-much-reduced sense of formality in Europe disconcerting, and I know Europeans find themselves disconcerted by American "friendliness."
But friendliness is not the same as familiarity. One may give a highly formal greeting that nonetheless makes the visitor very welcome, and one can be laid-back and rudely unwelcoming.
In an odd way, formality can be more friendly, especially where there is a divide in familiar social customs. The word "familiar" comes from the same root as "family" and implies a habitual rather than consciously learned set of behaviors. Where these habits are not ingrained, being plunged into a casual social situation can be very very awkward: rules are not spelled out, and in the everyday business of eating, going to the toilet, and simply sitting and relaxing, feelings are likely to be hurt.
But, of course, formality can be off-putting. I did not like the whole be-on-your-best-manners part of visiting my maternal grandparents. The silverware, the posture, the careful wordings... and in retrospect they were not that bad at all, pretty tolerant and gently corrective to their grandson.
The difference between formality as welcome and formality as barrier is in whether the formal system permits access to the habitual. A street map allows one to discover a network, but that same network can be learned (think new cabbies with their nose in the street atlas vs. old-timers who know the city streets by heart).
Where formality is destructive is where there is no gateway through to familiarity: Eliza Doolittle could learn to be a lady, but unless her Pakistani modern-day counterpart is truly judged by her habits, speech and carriage, her skin color will forever bar her. You can be as polite as you want to awful old Great-aunt Phyllis, but she will never let you see her heart, or see you as you are.
And where maps truly do provide a barrier, they too are a problem: where they are used to create ghettoes and bantustans and reservations, to clearly and unequivocally state that this sort of person will only be allowed here and here, to rationalize and clarify violent systems.
They are also a bar where formality becomes its own ingrained habit. This is the class bar: when you have grown up used to formal habits, you have an inherent, and unfair, social advantage over those who have had to learn the formal system, and for whom it will always be a foreign language.
My own take-home for this is that it is always best that a formal system like cartography remain a foreign language to all who use it; one may become fluent, but if it becomes the language in which you relax in your pajamas, then you need in a sense to recuse yourself from using it as a tool for power. You become a host, and ought not really claim this common land of formal systems as territory.
Thursday, September 11, 2008
Class
The last full post from my Quaker blog, from July 8, 2008:
So I've been spending some time working through Jeanne's Social Class and Quakers blog. Not every entry, but trying to get a feeling of where she's coming from.
And I keep getting really ticked off.
Now I like Jeanne, from what I know of her. I like the idea of confronting the cultural claptrap that has nothing to do with the central messages of Quakerism, but which tags along when a group of people from a similar background get together...
No, what gets me specifically is class. I feel like I've specifically tried for much of my life to simultaneously be true to what I am (overeducated, wordy, stuck-in-my-head) and to not get stuck in any class. And not to do the same to other folks. And here I am being labeled "owner class."
I fit the image. I shop at the co-op, read the NY Times, listen to NPR, vote the Democratic ticket... I remember after a long season hopping around doing this and that after moving back to the cities, walking with Ingrid into the Wedge Co-op and breathing in. "Ahh, my people!" I think I said to Ingrid at the time.
But I still rebel at the idea of class. I hate it because it's not a choice. It's like caste in its implications: you were born into it and you will be it until you die. I reject that. I want what I am not to be somehow "symptomatic."
I don't want to be a "type."
-----
Class as such seems too simple. Talking about "owner class" feels like talking about "Black Americans" as if all people descended from African slaves have some gene that makes them all think alike, or for that matter about "Quakerly behavior." Jeanne posed the query of what exactly we mean by that in her latest post.
When I think about "people like me" I think a lot more specifically than "raised with family funds to support me." Specifically, I find myself alienated from people who don't like questions, or who only like safe, cute, or banal expression, or for whom bigger is better. It is a smallish subset of owner class folk who meet that description, and indeed there are plenty of well-educated poor folk who also meet that description.
I clearly need to write up the story of the Tattoo-Rhumba Man. Soon.
So I've been spending some time working through Jeanne's Social Class and Quakers blog. Not every entry, but trying to get a feeling of where she's coming from.
And I keep getting really ticked off.
Now I like Jeanne, from what I know of her. I like the idea of confronting the cultural claptrap that has nothing to do with the central messages of Quakerism, but which tags along when a group of people from a similar background get together...
No, what gets me specifically is class. I feel like I've specifically tried for much of my life to simultaneously be true to what I am (overeducated, wordy, stuck-in-my-head) and to not get stuck in any class. And not to do the same to other folks. And here I am being labeled "owner class."
I fit the image. I shop at the co-op, read the NY Times, listen to NPR, vote the Democratic ticket... I remember after a long season hopping around doing this and that after moving back to the cities, walking with Ingrid into the Wedge Co-op and breathing in. "Ahh, my people!" I think I said to Ingrid at the time.
But I still rebel at the idea of class. I hate it because it's not a choice. It's like caste in its implications: you were born into it and you will be it until you die. I reject that. I want what I am not to be somehow "symptomatic."
I don't want to be a "type."
-----
Class as such seems too simple. Talking about "owner class" feels like talking about "Black Americans" as if all people descended from African slaves have some gene that makes them all think alike, or for that matter about "Quakerly behavior." Jeanne posed the query of what exactly we mean by that in her latest post.
When I think about "people like me" I think a lot more specifically than "raised with family funds to support me." Specifically, I find myself alienated from people who don't like questions, or who only like safe, cute, or banal expression, or for whom bigger is better. It is a smallish subset of owner class folk who meet that description, and indeed there are plenty of well-educated poor folk who also meet that description.
I clearly need to write up the story of the Tattoo-Rhumba Man. Soon.
Friday, November 2, 2007
Class Acts and Right Maps
[note: sorry to re-edit afterposting, but I just re-read this and parts make no sense even to me. Hence the rewrite —Nat]
I read The Invention of Art by Larry Shiner almost two years ago, and since then it's been at the center of my arguments, at first about maps and art, and more recently about cartography as a tradition. So I went out on the web recently to see what other folks were saying about Shiner and found... precious little. Disappointing. I did run across an interview by Stewart Home with Roger Taylor, who wrote a book almost 30 years ago called Art, an Enemy of the People. The interview is largely taken up with comparisons between Shiner and Taylor's approaches. The book sounded interesting, so I got it from the library.
It's been a slow slog. In spite of his goal of "writing for the people," the style is, well, thick. But it's an interesting read for all that. As the interview alludes to, while Shiner talks about the class-based origins of Fine Arts in the 17th and 18th century and then moves on, Taylor's standpoint remains rooted in questions of class (Shiner moves away from class discussions in discussing Art's alienation).
I don't think about class much as such. As an American, I've learned it's impolite to talk about class. I know class is a larger part of European public consciousness, but... I've never honestly seen it so starkly illustrated as when comparing the American (Shiner) with the Brit (Taylor).
Taylor's history of the rise of Art is a bit more nuanced than Shiners. He puts the initial formulation of Fine Arts somewhere in the sixteenth century. It was (he says) initially a theory grounded in the concept of "Truth": Art is Truth, non-Art is not-Truth. This idea supported the idea of hereditary of nobility. Art is Art because it is essentially truthful, and no context can make it otherwise, just as nobility are noble because they were born that way. The formulation was in defense of the bourgeois idea that quality can be earned,.
As the bourgeoisie burgeoned, and the art market became just that (a market), Art became a matter of "Taste" and then of "Beauty." No longer was art of the aristocracy being defended from bourgeois aspirations; now it was the art of the haute bourgeois being defended from common craft. Taylor's argument is that art is never about "the masses." To the extent that is it is advertised as "good for the masses," it is essentially reinforcing bourgeois values on the proletariat.
I like this guy. (Oddly, he's not a Marxist. Socialist, yes, but not Marxist. Whatever.)
OK, I haven't finished the book yet, so I can't summarize everything he says, but I started thinking ahead to how cartography would fit into this scheme. We are not a proletarian discipline. Not a lot of farm-workers and factory-workers at NACIS. But we also tend to have a relatively "proletarian" attitude towards our work, to wit: "enough with the theory, make the map they've hired you to do."
Which is pretty much the attitude of the colleagues I work with. And it's a lot of what drives Denis Wood and other theorists batty. You're oppressed, dammit! Shake off your chains!
More later.
----
Which brings me to Stephen Holloway's really wonderful "Right Map Making." Stephen presented it at NACIS this year. I appreciated it at the time, and then went off to listen to the other panels, but it has kept coming back to me. Which was the idea, I guess. It's a broadside in a couple of ways. First, it's a beautiful single sheet printed piece (a broadside).
Second, it neatly sidesteps the whole philosophical/ontological debate/sargasso sea and attacks the problem of ethics and maps and our effect on the world head on, a shot not philosophically across the bow but right into the heart of our day-to-day work, using the Buddhist language of "right practice."
Go read it, it speaks for itself.
I read The Invention of Art by Larry Shiner almost two years ago, and since then it's been at the center of my arguments, at first about maps and art, and more recently about cartography as a tradition. So I went out on the web recently to see what other folks were saying about Shiner and found... precious little. Disappointing. I did run across an interview by Stewart Home with Roger Taylor, who wrote a book almost 30 years ago called Art, an Enemy of the People. The interview is largely taken up with comparisons between Shiner and Taylor's approaches. The book sounded interesting, so I got it from the library.
It's been a slow slog. In spite of his goal of "writing for the people," the style is, well, thick. But it's an interesting read for all that. As the interview alludes to, while Shiner talks about the class-based origins of Fine Arts in the 17th and 18th century and then moves on, Taylor's standpoint remains rooted in questions of class (Shiner moves away from class discussions in discussing Art's alienation).
I don't think about class much as such. As an American, I've learned it's impolite to talk about class. I know class is a larger part of European public consciousness, but... I've never honestly seen it so starkly illustrated as when comparing the American (Shiner) with the Brit (Taylor).
Taylor's history of the rise of Art is a bit more nuanced than Shiners. He puts the initial formulation of Fine Arts somewhere in the sixteenth century. It was (he says) initially a theory grounded in the concept of "Truth": Art is Truth, non-Art is not-Truth. This idea supported the idea of hereditary of nobility. Art is Art because it is essentially truthful, and no context can make it otherwise, just as nobility are noble because they were born that way. The formulation was in defense of the bourgeois idea that quality can be earned,.
As the bourgeoisie burgeoned, and the art market became just that (a market), Art became a matter of "Taste" and then of "Beauty." No longer was art of the aristocracy being defended from bourgeois aspirations; now it was the art of the haute bourgeois being defended from common craft. Taylor's argument is that art is never about "the masses." To the extent that is it is advertised as "good for the masses," it is essentially reinforcing bourgeois values on the proletariat.
I like this guy. (Oddly, he's not a Marxist. Socialist, yes, but not Marxist. Whatever.)
OK, I haven't finished the book yet, so I can't summarize everything he says, but I started thinking ahead to how cartography would fit into this scheme. We are not a proletarian discipline. Not a lot of farm-workers and factory-workers at NACIS. But we also tend to have a relatively "proletarian" attitude towards our work, to wit: "enough with the theory, make the map they've hired you to do."
Which is pretty much the attitude of the colleagues I work with. And it's a lot of what drives Denis Wood and other theorists batty. You're oppressed, dammit! Shake off your chains!
More later.
----
Which brings me to Stephen Holloway's really wonderful "Right Map Making." Stephen presented it at NACIS this year. I appreciated it at the time, and then went off to listen to the other panels, but it has kept coming back to me. Which was the idea, I guess. It's a broadside in a couple of ways. First, it's a beautiful single sheet printed piece (a broadside).
Second, it neatly sidesteps the whole philosophical/ontological debate/sargasso sea and attacks the problem of ethics and maps and our effect on the world head on, a shot not philosophically across the bow but right into the heart of our day-to-day work, using the Buddhist language of "right practice."
Go read it, it speaks for itself.
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