Trauma as Explanation

 Since becoming a parent—or really starting a bit before then—my sister has immersed herself in the writings of an interconnected group of thinkers: experts in the psychology of child development and preadolescent trauma like Gabor Maté, educational theorists who are developing more contemporary forms of the Montessori method, and a host of less well-known writers, bloggers, vloggers, TikTokers, and cogitators expounding the concept and methodology of "gentle parenting." 

The common thread running through all these sources is a belief in the capital importance of autonomy in the growth of the healthy personality. To this way of thinking, every person needs autonomy, including—if not especially—small children. They therefore should be allowed to exercise the utmost degree of free personal choice consistent with their own and others' safety, and trauma is what results when someone diminishes and violates that freedom and personal autonomy. 

Public Sacrifices

"Were the Rosenbergs framed?" This classic way of formulating the question implies that there are only two options: either Julius and Ethel Rosenberg—the parents of two young children who were killed by electric chair on June 19, 1953 on charges of "conspiracy to commit espionage"—were wholly innocent victims of a postwar Red Scare, or they were guilty and therefore presumably deserving of their fate. 

On this reading, the conventional historiography of the case divides into two periods: (1) in the years immediately following their trial, educated opinion generally presumed they were innocent. This was due to left-wing suspicion of the government and the collective need to make atonement and beat one's breast over the excesses of McCarthyism, etc. 

Sunbeams

 When some friends visited me over the weekend, it soon occurred to us it was the first time we all had chatted since some recent major changes in my professional life. They were excited about my decision to follow their own recently-trod path into law school and had many questions about the journey ahead: what classes would I take in my first semester? What would I choose for my 1L summer internship? Had I been assigned to a section yet? 

Attempting to answer, I realized just how little thought I had given to any of these subjects. It was easy enough to look up the schedule for first year classes; I just hadn't done so. I should have some sort of plan for my summer vacations; but I didn't. And I had no idea what a section was. To be honest, the whole subject had scarcely occupied my thoughts this summer. I knew I was going to law school; but I had built no castles in the air; I had no bold daydreams of the adventure ahead. 

Collective Guilt

 A friend of mine was describing his hypothetical plans for a future political career. He informed me that if, in this role, he were ever called upon to give a speech denouncing the human rights violations of some foreign nation, he would try to do so in a way that avoided any taint of American self-righteousness. How would he do so? Well, he would be sure to condemn the United States's own violations—current and historic—in the same breath. He gave an example of the latter: the cultural genocide the U.S. government committed through the use of federal Indian boarding schools—the legacy of which the Interior Department recently discussed and acknowledged for the first time in a lengthy report. 

He said all of this; and then I immediately put my foot in my mouth. "Why would you need to apologize for that?" I asked. My point was not to deny a sense of historical responsibility. I could see why someone like me—a white man—might need to apologize for the crimes of my settler colonialist predecessors. But my friend's antecedents had come to the country by quite different means. What did he have to feel bad about? My friend said it sounded like I was implying he didn't belong in this country. I said, to the contrary, he has more right than I do, since his ancestors were not implicated in the crimes we were discussing, and besides, if there was one form of belonging no one should envy, it's surely collective guilt. 

The Selfishness of Animals?

When a friend first sent me a news alert referenced in the last post—the one in which Pope Francis criticized some people as "selfish" for choosing to have pets instead of children—a passage from Whitman came to mind. In the famous section of the "Song of Myself" that begins "I think I could turn and live with animals...," the poet justifies his preference for quadrupedal life by observing that animals, unlike humans, "do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,/They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God[.]" Which seemed like a particularly fit rejoinder to the Pope's comments—not only because the poet's words justify a love of pets, but because they abjure the whole framework of sin and self-mortification in which condemnations of the "selfishness of others" are so often posed. 

In turning back to Whitman's verse to find the exact phrasing, though, a different resonance struck me. The reasons the poet gives for wanting to "live with animals" are the same that Freud gave—as cited in Dombek's book discussed in the previous post—in seeking to explain why people are drawn to "narcissists." The animals, Whitman says, are lovable because they are "so self-contain'd." Freud speaks of the attraction of the narcissist in similar terms, and compares it explicitly to the reasons why people find delight in animals. Dombek quotes the passage as follows: "The charm of a child [...] lies to a great extent in his narcissism, his self-contentment [....] just as does the charm of certain animals which seem not to concern themselves about us, such as cats and large birds of prey." 

Regarding the Selfishness of Others

As Kristin Dombek notes in her book-length essay, The Selfishness of Others, every articulate generation believes that it is living through an epidemic of selfishness. Never the selfishness of themselves, of course—not of the writers and presumptive readers of thought pieces denouncing the new selfishness—but of others. Particularly those who are not present in the conversation to defend themselves, and who therefore can be treated as polemical fair game: children, the very young, members of various nonconforming social groups who lack spokespeople in the immediate vicinity. 

Dombek was critiquing this myth of selfishness and the new narcissism—which we all believed in, by the way, in the years before her book was published; myself included. Despite being a Millennial, I would quote uncritically statistics from major news articles deploring the "declining empathy scores" reportedly found among the college-bound young, without inquiring much into the origin of such figures. (As Dombek shows, many of the core empirical claims of the then-trending belief in a crisis of "narcissism" fell apart under scrutiny—or at least became much harder to substantiate.)

The Už

 A friend of mine so loathes the effort involved in explaining complex facts about his life, that it has become a running gag between us that every time I ask him something that threatens to call forth such a response ("what's happening at work?", for instance), he responds with the catch-all phrase: "oh... you know... the usual."

Except he doesn't say "the usual." He says only the first two letters of that word, "the us," but pronounced as they are in the word "usual." It's a simple enough sound to make. It is one that occurs in plenty of American English words. "Casual," for instance. Or the second g in garage. There is no difficulty whatsoever in saying it conversationally. 

More to say on Keynes, Ukraine, etc...

 After three lengthy blog posts at a pace of one a day, I'm as ready as my readers no doubt are to move on from the subject of Keynes and World War I comparisons. But the world keeps hurling events in my path that leave me more convinced than ever that we are in danger of repeating that history. With pressure now growing in the United States for the White House to confiscate the assets of the Russian central bank and hand them over to Ukraine, we are seeing the groundwork laid before our eyes for a Versailles-style bargaining posture that not only threatens to prolong the war indefinitely but—if it did ever bring it to an end—would lead to a ruinous and most unrestful peace. 

Of course, as we discussed last time, the U.S. has in the very recent past expropriated the sovereign wealth of a foreign country—Afghanistan—and specifically its central bank reserves. And while legal experts say that confiscation was on firmer legal ground—due to the fact that we do not recognize the current Afghan government—it was morally, I say, on far shakier terrain. After all, that was a country in a far more vulnerable economic position—facing humanitarian crisis and risk of starvation, one to which the U.S. owed a unique historic debt in the wake of a twenty-year occupation, and one whose central bank assets included—due to the distinctive way the bank was set up—the savings of many ordinary Afghans.