Dr. Hatchet and Mr. Kind: The Two Voices of the Ego (under revision)(26' without the Chinese temple scene)[see Buddhist teaching from Amy Schwartz's teacher at end]
In an intramural touch football game in, ah, 1964, I caught a pass for a touchdown. The ball was well away from my body and below my knees; I took it from the air with hands that until that moment had helped me mostly to run without losing my balance. I was slender and bookish, on the edge of being a nerd, and I drank in my fraternity teammates' applause like nourishment, like a tonic.
A touchdown in an informal pick-up game between two college fraternities carries zero currency, none, in the way of adult bragging rights. And yet this moment was for me an experience of healing. It changed my relationship with my body and contributed to the formation of a more enterprising public self. It was somehow more encouraging than my having set a school record in track at my high school a few years before.
Still, the value of this chance, inconsequential acclaim has long been overshadowed by the continuing vitality of demons I share with millions or billions of others: these bad advisors murmur softly but insidiously and ceaselessly. Among their many unsettling concerns are professional achievement; social status; economic class; and age, or what I think of as perceived distance from death. They say things like, "Imply something uncomplimentary about a colleague whom students are drawn to." "Earn more money so you can do whatever and display more upscale stuff." These ugly songs are hard to ignore but are also hard to catch in the act, let alone to silence.
No matter how improbably and absurdly, the catch and touchdown helped me listen to those harsh strains less attentively, to feel less inadequate, to feel approximately as manly as classmates who were physically stronger, more confidently virile. In this way it reduced my predictable and embarrassing need at the time to see varsity football players, say, as intellectually undernourished. It peeled a layer from the set of self-protective lenses through which I viewed the world. Other layers, of course, remained.
In my second or third year here, now almost forty years ago, I was living in Wentworth and wondering how we were going to help a new Lower who seemed almost beside himself with anxiety, especially in dealing with adults. Finally the dorm head, Don Schultz, and I decided we would have a friendly chat with the student in which we would play not good cop/bad cop but good guy/good guy and change his perception of authority figures from Old Testament God to Barney. Mr. Schultz was a kindly person, compassionate and humorous, though the students sometimes called him "The Butcher" because on occasion he could be cheerfully hardline about things like being late for check-in.
When the conversation took place, everything seemed to go well. We sat in comfortable chairs in Don's apartment. He and I told endearing stories and explained our benign philosophy. The student was, if not relaxed, then at least polite and calm. Afterwards Don and I congratulated ourselves and exchanged hopes for a successful outcome.
Later that evening there was a knock on my door. It was Cary Staller, one of our proctors. He was very direct. "What did you do to [the new Lower]?" he asked. "The guy is sitting in his room, trembling."
I still recognize this as a substantial failure, but I no longer feel too guilty about it. Still this experience showed me how the ego can color almost everything one does. On that night my investment in a vision of myself as a person of good will kept me from seeing what the student was experiencing. I think--I hope–-I learned something from this experience about listening, but it remains a work in progress, a discipline for which the occasion never expires.
So I have been thinking about the contradictory claims of the ego, a puzzle that has engaged people for centuries, one that seems to be built into the nature of human experience at a pretty deep level. It was posed a couple of millennia ago by Hillel the Elder: "If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? And when I am for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?"
The ego--a durable sense of self, necessary for love and art and meaningful service--gives us Whitman and Emerson; it is a chamber in the heart of all those with the courage to face down tyranny, whether political or cultural: Bishop Gene Robinson, Wangari Maatthai in Kenya, Rigoberta Menchu in Guatemala, martyred Sri Lankan journalist Lasantha Wickramatunga, Nelson Mandela.
And yet the ego--the precarious sense of self that is inclined to see difference from itself as threatening or loathsome--tries to lead many of us down dark back alleys, where we can avoid or stealthily attack the Other (with a capital O). This version or part of the ego is driven to compare, endlessly, and then to congratulate itself if the comparison is flattering, and to hiss and throw tomatoes, or worse, if it isn't. For most of us freedom from this need and its well disguised or denied meanness is a lifelong challenge.
The ego in this second sense is mercurial, volatile, and insatiable. Unconsciously we try, often ruthlessly, to shore up its defenses--for instance, through projection, the defense mechanism in which we attribute to someone else what we least like or most fear about ourselves. These defenses are irrational and intrinsically flimsy, but we keep returning to them. Without them we would have to reconstruct our sense of who we are--that is, to change and grow.
A friend of mine, a writer, said once, "To know what one truly feels is a lifetime's learning." Part of that learning, that work, really, is coming to know what the self-protective lenses are and how they distort one's perceptions.
These are themes that have been searchingly explored in literature. In William Carlos Williams' unforgettable autobiographical story "The Use of Force," Williams, a physician, uses a large metal spoon and excessive force to obtain a throat culture from a child whose life is threatened by diphtheria. The story is about the ways in which the ego dresses up behavior that is socially justifiable but morally unsettling. In "The Outstation," by Somerset Maugham, one of the great stories in the language, two Englishmen serving their country's empire in the far East become trapped in a war of egos. Each calls or rather conceptualizes the other as the Other, while the story ironically shows us the core commonality between them, the defense of the fragile self that has invested so naturally and so rashly and in this case so fatally in its disguises. One sees the other as a moneyed prig; the other views him as a lower-class boor, an unmannerly slob. Both are lonely and vulnerable. At the end one is dead, and the ego of the survivor enjoys a festival of self-congratulation.
I recognized an opposing example of the ego's reach--a case where it is generous rather than perverse--in an English film I saw in October, "An Education." Near the end of that film the protagonist, Jenny, who is shamefacedly recovering from a heedless affair with a handsome, charming, and deeply dishonest older man, needs help, since by this time she has been expelled from school and seems to have lost her way, certainly her way to Oxford. She goes to see her former English teacher, Miss Stubbs, a woman whom earlier Jenny called (to her face) 'dead' when the teacher tried to get Jenny to discipline herself and become a real student. Now when Jenny asks for Miss Stubbs' help, it is freely given, without a trace of resentment or reproach or hesitation. Miss Stubbs becomes an emblem not only of someone with a profession and its attendant expectations and ethics, but of vocation, of a true calling. She understands, and acts--joyfully--on the understanding, that the moment is about Jenny, not about her. As a physician said years ago on accepting the John Phillips Award, "We are privileged to serve."
I find that my ability to take off and set aside my own defensive lenses is enlarged by experiences that nourish my ego in a healthy way, as my touchdown catch paradoxically did. Perhaps the most important strengthening influence on me, certainly a fundamental one, was my mother, who did not put such lenses on, a claim I would make for very few people. My mother had her limitations, God knows, but defensive nastiness wasn't one of them. For instance: she and my father were divorced when I was five, but I never heard her speak ill of him, only sorrowfully or respectfully, even though she never regretted the divorce. When she wanted to push someone's buttons, especially her own father's or her Republican brother's, she did so not with anger but with a sort of anarchic humor, a certain impish joy. Here is a short piece I wrote about her recently. She died four years ago in her mid-nineties.
Legacy
I sit in Washington Square Park, where the southwest corner belongs to chess and has built-in tables, all hosting games of some intensity. Men and men, men and boys take each other on. One pair relishes the constraints of a small but noisy clock, peremptory as an egg-timer. A local master humbles two opponents at a time. Across the park a group of rappers performs for a substantial crowd. Everywhere in between surges kaleidoscopic heterogeneity[color and variety]: skaters, professors, lovers, musicians, children with observant parents and ice cream. Not to mention the comic miscellany of the dogs pulling on their leashes to reach the run or some improbable acquaintance. My mother would have loved this: the exuberant abundance of the ordinary.
In some ways she preferred the Depression to what came afterwards: she loved its huge community of shared not-having. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. She worked, helped others to work, married my father. She became a candidate for Justice of the Peace; her cheap Socialist Party campaign card from the 30s, with its dour, almost thuggish passport shot--the worst picture I have of her--honors my desk.
The mother I knew first-hand still worked for the State to match job seekers with openings, and she volunteered endlessly: for liberal candidates, at a soup kitchen, on committees at the Unitarian church. The descendant of white people who settled New Haven in the seventeenth century, she was an officer in the Danbury, CT, chapter of the NAACP. At forty she liked it when the kids at my bithday party were white, black, affluent, not. So her dreams remained catholic (with a small c).
All people are equal, she said, and lived by the words, with friends of myriad ethnicities and economic circumstances, a crowd as protean [irreducibly diverse] as the one I see in the Park. New York was her lodestar: she rejoiced in the city's manic variousness, its standing challenge to its own claims of money and class. A letter from a friend longs for universal human flourishing, giving me a language for her deepest wish.
. . . . . . . .
When Ilo and I became parents, we hoped for our child, Anya, that she would be honest and fair and also that she would like herself without needing to draw her self-love from the putting down of others. An early sign of success, sort of, came when she was about four. This is a brief journal entry I wrote at that time:
Ilo tried to give Anya a moral lesson today. Anya had been repeatedly nasty to her friend and neighbor Jay, and Ilo was looking for a winning mix of criticism and encouragement. "You'll feel a lot better about yourself when you do what you should be doing," she suggested. But Anya's prompt response showed what a queenly serenity her fledgling conscience is up against: "Mom, I always feel good about myself, when I'm doing right and when I'm doing wrong."
As one gets older, the ego has to enlarge its skill set. Over time we learn, often by hurting others or by being hurt ourselves, how to avoid giving offense and how to create the win-win strategies that 'non sibi' implies. But we need to be wary about which groups and goals we invest in. It's often hard to tell whether a particular goal is speaking to the ego that gives you kindness or the one that at bottom gives you only ruthless vanity. Winning things--cross-country championships, admission to college, even tenure here--, e.g.: Are such concrete, pleasant achievements fundamental to the self? Or are they just clever seductions that clothe narcissism in stylish garments? The question is in no way rhetorical.
These riddles apply not to just to the ego in isolation but to group identities as well. When we join or remain in a group, the ego, or both egos, have a stake in the decision. Say we join a church. Even the great faith traditions, which should encourage us in the growth of empathy, often seem to focus their benevolence quite inwardly rather than universally, to promote self-identification within what Erik Erickson called 'the pseudo-species.' Southern Baptists and Catholics, for instance, have been known to have trouble with extending equal respect to non-believers; and so, if the truth be faced, have members of liberal churches, who often define religious conservatives as the Other (with a capital O). Can we distinguish between collective identities that are simply affirmative and those that seem to thrive on devaluing someone else?
Occasionally a great spirit will share a vision of absolute inclusiveness, which invites us to give up the part of the ego that wants the confining but seductive safety of a tribe. Archbishop Desmond Tutu says that the most radical theme of Christianity is found in Jesus' embrace of "all, all, all, all, all, all."
Tutu reminds us that the most obvious resolution of the riddle of the ego, its capacity for both generosity and exclusion, is love. Certainly it is better by far to make commitments of love within a family, a group of friends, a team, a dorm, a school, a faith community than not at all. When we are driven, or carried, by love, we are likelier to be outside the small box of the self. Sometimes the box itself seems to be becoming larger.
Most of the time love is the deepest transcendence I can reach, transcendence of the anxieties, frustrations, and self-declared triumphs of the self. But once in a while I glimpse something beyond even love. It does not nullify or trivialize love, but it contains it. For me this larger reality seems to be located most often in nature and in art. Last spring Ilo and I and two close friends went to see The Alvin Ailey Dance Company's 50th anniversary performance in Boston. They did their signature piece, Revelations, in which color, form, the music of spirituals, and the unimaginable athleticism and grace of the dancers reenact survival and joy in the context of African-American history. Whenever I watch that brilliant company perform that great piece, or when I listen to Schubert's string quintet, or when I look at some of the paintings of Velasquez or Rembrandt, or when I attend a great play, for the moment my human self, its best version as well as its hobbled ones, is left behind.
There are other routes as well. In my rudimentary understanding of Buddhism we are all urged to seek detachment from desire as a route to enlightenment; but once when I stood in a Buddhist monastery in Szechuan, China, I watched my grown daughter, then a Peace Corps volunteer, kneel and bow three times before an eight-foot human figure of mercy, a boddhisatva, a spiritually advanced person understood to have set aside enlightenment in order to be able to retain a role of consolation within the human framework. After each bow a monk struck a gong, and at the end he struck it a fourth time, for closure.
Anya's friend Kang-Le and I had walked on that oppressively hot July day for perhaps a mile along a muddy riverbank and then had taken an ancient ferry across to the monastery, a small one. Later, after the bows to the boddhisatva, in a nearby, deeply shaded enclosure a couple of young monks asked us to sit with them at some lovely stone tables a few feet away.
When they asked about our relationships, Anya said that I was her father, Kang-Le her friend. 'We are all friends,' one of the monks said, not in correction but as a sign of our part in a universal friendship. When Kang-Le asked them whether they practiced any of the martial arts, the monk said, again gently, 'Sitting here is a martial art'--that is, he embraced every detail of life as a spiritual discipline. Soon Anya, mindful of a date for supper at which we would be guests, observed that it was five o'clock and we would have to go, and one of the monks said, 'You live so fast.'
I do not breathe air of such purity very often, but this past summer I stood on Horsethief Butte, overlooking the Columbia River in Oregon. A friend and I had driven for ninety miles, first through a densely forested gorge with a series of distinctive waterfalls and then on into high desert, where the basaltic [ck. this] rock formations and the upland vineyards, orchards, and ranches replace the dark forests that seem both eternal and fertile. From the top of Horsethief Butte you can see miles of the river in both directions and also Mt. Hood, which rises thousands of feet above the treeline into glacier and snow and which reminded me of the spiritual promise of a Mt. Fujiyama or Kilimanjaro, great presences I have known only through photographs and paintings.
In the desert as elsewhere in the northwest we saw astonishingly varied plants and flowers, many of these with tiny blossoms of white or pink. The plant life was sparser here than in the side gorges of the varied and dramatic waterfalls downstream but in a way felt more precious, appearing as it did in places that seemed, in their dryness and absence of topsoil, designed to stymie the impulse toward growth and organic diversity. Even the rocks themselves did not seem barren, partly because they stand so near the lifegiving river and partly because the height and mass of the rock formations suggest a mysterious presence both watchful and detached--not unfeeling, exactly, but an embodiment of a very long and comprehensive perspective.
This idea (that spirit is immanent [pervasively present] in the rock formations) is in me, not provably in the rocks, but standing in their shadows and gazing up at their massive but subtly textured fronts, one gets some idea of the experience of native peoples for whom such places were sacred in the way of cathedrals or, rather, Olympus, since the variations of shape and form suggest a plurality of spirits rather than a single one. Are these neighboring spirits all of the same mind? But they share a common remoteness and transcendence, and in their physical presence the noise of the ego--of both its voices--faded for a time into perfect silence.
[from Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel]
When we take our experience to heart it really works against the ego because the ego doesn’t want to be touched by life basically. The ego wants to hold everything at bay. All the ego wants from life is to get what it wants, and get rid of what it doesn’t want, and use everything to cherish, and protect itself. The ego is brilliant at keeping life at a distance. And blame is the perfect way of doing this, keeping life at a distance. It’s not “your” life. Somebody’s doing something “to” you. Life is unfair “to you”. When we do it like this we don’t have to change at all. We could just stay the same. We don’t have to self-reflect. We don’t have to let the world touch us, and change us. Even though this is a really painful way to live, we’re comfortable living this way, and we’re very habituated at times to living this way.
Monday, October 19, 2009
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
on gay marriage and NH legislation
statement prepared for a service at the First Unitarian Universalist Society of Exeter (FUUSE):
I grew up at a time when there were supposed to be only a relative handful of gay people in existence, more or less equally divided between Greenwich Village and San Francisco and more or less all fulfilling the demeaning stereotypes of the period. No one was out at my high school, and in college, a much larger place, I was aware only of a few bohemian types whose being gay was rumored. It was many years before I learned that one of my closest high school friends had moved to SF, worked there on the public policy side of AIDS response, and died of AIDS in 1995; it was 2005 before I learned that one of my first cousins is gay. By that time though I had begun to wise up and get involved, through the GSA (Gay-Straight Alliance) at PEA, the Welcoming Congregation Committee at FUUSE, and being on the board of NH Freedom to Marry. I made these commitments not on a philosophical or religious basis but because of individuals I had come to know in the years between. One, Rick Spalding, now chaplain at Williams College, preached at FUUSE a few years ago. In the years between his being my student at the Academy in 1972 and perhaps fifteen years after that, he had became a sort of wisdom figure for me. Another led the GSA, did a Master's degree at Harvard Divinity School, and now teaches at an independent school in Indiana. As an Exeter senior she wrote a poem that she spoke aloud to the entire school. It was a statement of gratitude for having been able to attend high school in a place that accepted her whole self, and it ended: "Nothing between me/ and the way God made me/ ever again." If this were a longer talk I could add many more names to this list of gay persons who are not only not disordered but are everything I can wish a person to be.
But even if they weren't the principled, compassionate, loving, occasionally mischievous people they are, they would still, like everyone else, deserve equal rights.
Earlier this month [Feb. 2009] I attended Judiciary Committee hearings in Concord on one bill that would repeal civil unions, replacing them with a return to discrimination, and on another bill that would open the law to civil marriage for same-sex couples. The testimony from those who continue to see gay identity as a violation of divine order has changed a little over the years. This time there were no cries of 'pedophilia' or 'bestiality.' Now the opponents of gay equality speak of "sexual complementarity" (if they are Catholic) or raise the specter of a slippery slope that leads straight to polygamy and marriage between brothers or sisters (if the arguer is fundamentalist). One asked the Committee if its members realized that to pass an equal marriage bill was to guarantee judgment and punishment from God.
At this point I had to choose between rolling my eyes and being a good UU. My visceral self wanted to stand up in the hearing room and say, "Where does your authoritative relationship with God come from? Christian doctrine has defended slavery; it has defended apartheid; it was the faith of many agents of the Third Reich. Now there are many Christians who read the same Bible you do and conclude that the Gospel doctrines of love and compassion take precedence over whatever verses record their time's recoil from same-sex relationships." When the opposing witness is secular (very few were), my anger says, Is the history of heterosexuality so glorious that it justifies us in demeaning another sexuality, even when it is monogamous, stable, respectful, and loving?
But if I am to keep my UUism with me on these occasions, I need to do better than that. I need to defeat the temptation to generalize about evangelical Christians; I need to extend to the opponents of same-sex marriage the same respect that we seek to preserve for all human beings. I need to remember my own failings (that shouldn't be difficult) and to ground my advocacy in affirmation, not anger. I will work at this, and I will do it better for being a member here. But the advocacy itself will continue until the law, at least, if not the entire culture, reaches the enactment of its own professed values. I hope I will see that day, and I wish it had not been so long delayed for Rick and my teacher friend and millions of others.
I grew up at a time when there were supposed to be only a relative handful of gay people in existence, more or less equally divided between Greenwich Village and San Francisco and more or less all fulfilling the demeaning stereotypes of the period. No one was out at my high school, and in college, a much larger place, I was aware only of a few bohemian types whose being gay was rumored. It was many years before I learned that one of my closest high school friends had moved to SF, worked there on the public policy side of AIDS response, and died of AIDS in 1995; it was 2005 before I learned that one of my first cousins is gay. By that time though I had begun to wise up and get involved, through the GSA (Gay-Straight Alliance) at PEA, the Welcoming Congregation Committee at FUUSE, and being on the board of NH Freedom to Marry. I made these commitments not on a philosophical or religious basis but because of individuals I had come to know in the years between. One, Rick Spalding, now chaplain at Williams College, preached at FUUSE a few years ago. In the years between his being my student at the Academy in 1972 and perhaps fifteen years after that, he had became a sort of wisdom figure for me. Another led the GSA, did a Master's degree at Harvard Divinity School, and now teaches at an independent school in Indiana. As an Exeter senior she wrote a poem that she spoke aloud to the entire school. It was a statement of gratitude for having been able to attend high school in a place that accepted her whole self, and it ended: "Nothing between me/ and the way God made me/ ever again." If this were a longer talk I could add many more names to this list of gay persons who are not only not disordered but are everything I can wish a person to be.
But even if they weren't the principled, compassionate, loving, occasionally mischievous people they are, they would still, like everyone else, deserve equal rights.
Earlier this month [Feb. 2009] I attended Judiciary Committee hearings in Concord on one bill that would repeal civil unions, replacing them with a return to discrimination, and on another bill that would open the law to civil marriage for same-sex couples. The testimony from those who continue to see gay identity as a violation of divine order has changed a little over the years. This time there were no cries of 'pedophilia' or 'bestiality.' Now the opponents of gay equality speak of "sexual complementarity" (if they are Catholic) or raise the specter of a slippery slope that leads straight to polygamy and marriage between brothers or sisters (if the arguer is fundamentalist). One asked the Committee if its members realized that to pass an equal marriage bill was to guarantee judgment and punishment from God.
At this point I had to choose between rolling my eyes and being a good UU. My visceral self wanted to stand up in the hearing room and say, "Where does your authoritative relationship with God come from? Christian doctrine has defended slavery; it has defended apartheid; it was the faith of many agents of the Third Reich. Now there are many Christians who read the same Bible you do and conclude that the Gospel doctrines of love and compassion take precedence over whatever verses record their time's recoil from same-sex relationships." When the opposing witness is secular (very few were), my anger says, Is the history of heterosexuality so glorious that it justifies us in demeaning another sexuality, even when it is monogamous, stable, respectful, and loving?
But if I am to keep my UUism with me on these occasions, I need to do better than that. I need to defeat the temptation to generalize about evangelical Christians; I need to extend to the opponents of same-sex marriage the same respect that we seek to preserve for all human beings. I need to remember my own failings (that shouldn't be difficult) and to ground my advocacy in affirmation, not anger. I will work at this, and I will do it better for being a member here. But the advocacy itself will continue until the law, at least, if not the entire culture, reaches the enactment of its own professed values. I hope I will see that day, and I wish it had not been so long delayed for Rick and my teacher friend and millions of others.
Compromise or Capitulation? (abortion & health care)
Compromise or Capitulation? (unpublished op-ed)
See also Jeffrey Toobin in The New Yorker 11-23-2009.
See also NYT editorial: Abortion and Health Care
At first glance, Congressional negotiations over the health-care reform bill's approach to abortion seem too technical to matter very much to very many people. Nevertheless, small differences in wording will have large consequences for millions, perhaps hundreds of millions of people.
The push by anti-abortionists to ban the use of federal subsidies for private or state health plans that cover abortion would, if successful, have two or more predictable consequences. 1) It would soothe the consciences of those who believe abortion to be murder, by further separating all taxpayer funding from the performance of any abortion except when the life of the pregnant woman is directly threatened (or, in some versions, when the pregnancy stems from incest or rape). 2) It would also separate women who seek an elective abortion from funding that could help them, perhaps even enable them, to obtain the procedure, in cases where the pregnancy resulted from incest or rape as well as in other cases. And there is a third, more speculative and more momentous consequence: it might contribute to the 'unsettling' of Roe v. Wade.
American history contains several models for the resolution of conflicts between individual conscience and the law. One of these is the "C.O. (conscientious objector) model," in which an individual, usually a pacifist, has been legally exempted from having to comply with a law, usually the military draft, when doing so would deeply violate the citizen's core beliefs. Another model is the "direct action model," in which citizens appalled by a law (like the one that forced return of escaped slaves from the north to the south) sought to nullify the law's effects on the ground--to turn it into a dead letter.
Earlier in the negotiations it was well accepted that the 2009 bills would be "abortion-neutral." That is, they would not touch Roe v. Wade, and they would not change the federal guideline on funding, which since 1982 has tended more and more to allow federal reimbursements only for abortions in which the pregnant woman's life could be saved by the procedure. This approach would have protected the "C.O. model" without adopting the "direct action model." But some of the current drafts go farther.
They do so by trying to limit not only the conscientious abortion opponent's involvement in abortion, even where that involvement has been indirect, but also to reduce the access of all women, including impoverished ones, to funding for a procedure which the Supreme Court has found to be a matter of right.
Since opponents of abortion are already not required either to undergo the procedure or to participate directly in its funding, the only logic which supports the extension of restrictions is the one that seeks to overturn the core idea of Roe v. Wade.
The anti-abortion negotiators are not presenting the issue in these terms. And some of the proposals, by allowing for "riders" through which women could obtain discretionary (non-subsidized) coverage, do not clearly mount an attack on a constitutional level. But the ones that close the door altogether do carry that implication, and it is a gorilla that weighs more than 800 pounds.
See also Jeffrey Toobin in The New Yorker 11-23-2009.
See also NYT editorial: Abortion and Health Care
At first glance, Congressional negotiations over the health-care reform bill's approach to abortion seem too technical to matter very much to very many people. Nevertheless, small differences in wording will have large consequences for millions, perhaps hundreds of millions of people.
The push by anti-abortionists to ban the use of federal subsidies for private or state health plans that cover abortion would, if successful, have two or more predictable consequences. 1) It would soothe the consciences of those who believe abortion to be murder, by further separating all taxpayer funding from the performance of any abortion except when the life of the pregnant woman is directly threatened (or, in some versions, when the pregnancy stems from incest or rape). 2) It would also separate women who seek an elective abortion from funding that could help them, perhaps even enable them, to obtain the procedure, in cases where the pregnancy resulted from incest or rape as well as in other cases. And there is a third, more speculative and more momentous consequence: it might contribute to the 'unsettling' of Roe v. Wade.
American history contains several models for the resolution of conflicts between individual conscience and the law. One of these is the "C.O. (conscientious objector) model," in which an individual, usually a pacifist, has been legally exempted from having to comply with a law, usually the military draft, when doing so would deeply violate the citizen's core beliefs. Another model is the "direct action model," in which citizens appalled by a law (like the one that forced return of escaped slaves from the north to the south) sought to nullify the law's effects on the ground--to turn it into a dead letter.
Earlier in the negotiations it was well accepted that the 2009 bills would be "abortion-neutral." That is, they would not touch Roe v. Wade, and they would not change the federal guideline on funding, which since 1982 has tended more and more to allow federal reimbursements only for abortions in which the pregnant woman's life could be saved by the procedure. This approach would have protected the "C.O. model" without adopting the "direct action model." But some of the current drafts go farther.
They do so by trying to limit not only the conscientious abortion opponent's involvement in abortion, even where that involvement has been indirect, but also to reduce the access of all women, including impoverished ones, to funding for a procedure which the Supreme Court has found to be a matter of right.
Since opponents of abortion are already not required either to undergo the procedure or to participate directly in its funding, the only logic which supports the extension of restrictions is the one that seeks to overturn the core idea of Roe v. Wade.
The anti-abortion negotiators are not presenting the issue in these terms. And some of the proposals, by allowing for "riders" through which women could obtain discretionary (non-subsidized) coverage, do not clearly mount an attack on a constitutional level. But the ones that close the door altogether do carry that implication, and it is a gorilla that weighs more than 800 pounds.
Monday, October 5, 2009
tennis and other ethics part 3
(unpublished op-ed)
The Culture of Tennis
In recent years tennis has gone some distance toward recovering sportsmanship and civility as elements of its culture. At least now an outburst like Serena Williams' draws a fine. Several of the leading players (Rafa Nadal, Juan Martin del Potro, and Kim Clijsters, e.g.) bring not only conventional courtesy but something much rarer: humility and grace.
The relatively new system of "challenges" often reinforces this welcome development by increasing the presumption that the official judge, not the player, is the more reliable line judge. However, it also shows that judges, trying to gauge the landing point of balls going over 100 m.p.h. within a fraction of an inch, are not infallible--and it provides instant correction when necessary. So far so good. This system generally allows matches to proceed with increased integrity and efficiency, as compared with the pre-challenge system, when players' outbursts both delayed the game and soured its atmosphere.
However there is room for a little fine tuning. One of Roger Federer's frustrations on Monday was a delay of several seconds before del Potro appealed one call. This has become common practice--a player decides whether or not to "spend" one of his allotted appeals only after (illegal) visual consultation with his supporters in the stands. Under the rules the challenge is supposed to be immediate, so Federer's irritation was well founded, if not appropriately expressed. Some other rules are also enforced with spacious discretion, like the one that the player receiving serve is supposed to play to the chosen rhythm of the server.
These are hard things to get right: ruthless enforcement would lead to many needless intrusions of officiating into the game. But too lax enforcement allows players to game the system.
There is a lot at stake in all this. With leadership from players like Nadal and Clijsters, the sport has a chance to consolidate a culture more like golf's, in which courtesy and sportsmanship not only prevail but extend to the willingness of most players to call penalties on themselves when they see that they have broken a rule, even inadvertently. The sport itself is understood to be larger and more fundamental than the outcome of a particular match or tournament, even with so much money at stake. It is unrealistic to expect tennis players to act against their self-interest, but they can be expected not to act dishonestly.
Earlier in the summer Novak Djokovic upheld a still higher standard, when he practically overruled an 'out' call that had gone against his opponent Andy Roddick. Roddick was up a set, but Djokovic had game point to remain up a break in the second set--in other words, it was a key, possibly even a pivotal point. Djokovic thought the ball had hit the line, so he gestured to Roddick that a challenge would be worthwhile. The challenge was upheld; the point and eventually the game went to Roddick, who also won the match.
It's not the outcome that shows the meaning of Djokovic's gesture. He acted instinctively, ethically, and for the most part counter-culturally. Many fans will fault him, even patronize him for jeopardizing and losing a game and probably a set that he could have won. Baseball and football players routinely try to trick umpires and refs into believing that they have caught balls that were only trapped (or worse). If a replay showed a player indicating to an official that a call had wrongly gone for his team, one can imagine the response in the clubhouse after the game. (Of course, a team outcome is at stake in those sports, whereas Djokovic was risking only his own advancement.)
It is not unrealistic to expect tennis to carry out a thoughtful study of the still relatively new system of challenges. Since the challenges themselves are entertaining, perhaps the rule could be amended to grant an additional one or two per set but officials could be stricter about requiring the challenges to be quick. Perhaps the coaches should not be seated so close to the court or should be fined or excluded if they collaborate in evading the rules.
Tennis doesn't need to undermine the good with a stretch for the perfect, but it would benefit from a higher level of consensus and from willing obedience to its own rules. In too many sports the no-brainer commitment to victory not only over the opponent but at the expense of the sport itself (as embodied in its rules and the spirit of its rules) is a poignant aspect of our culture. Tennis can help to push back against this impoverished norm. It is time for the players' representatives and the officials to talk these issues through and see whether they can come to and codify a less contentious protocol.
The Culture of Tennis
In recent years tennis has gone some distance toward recovering sportsmanship and civility as elements of its culture. At least now an outburst like Serena Williams' draws a fine. Several of the leading players (Rafa Nadal, Juan Martin del Potro, and Kim Clijsters, e.g.) bring not only conventional courtesy but something much rarer: humility and grace.
The relatively new system of "challenges" often reinforces this welcome development by increasing the presumption that the official judge, not the player, is the more reliable line judge. However, it also shows that judges, trying to gauge the landing point of balls going over 100 m.p.h. within a fraction of an inch, are not infallible--and it provides instant correction when necessary. So far so good. This system generally allows matches to proceed with increased integrity and efficiency, as compared with the pre-challenge system, when players' outbursts both delayed the game and soured its atmosphere.
However there is room for a little fine tuning. One of Roger Federer's frustrations on Monday was a delay of several seconds before del Potro appealed one call. This has become common practice--a player decides whether or not to "spend" one of his allotted appeals only after (illegal) visual consultation with his supporters in the stands. Under the rules the challenge is supposed to be immediate, so Federer's irritation was well founded, if not appropriately expressed. Some other rules are also enforced with spacious discretion, like the one that the player receiving serve is supposed to play to the chosen rhythm of the server.
These are hard things to get right: ruthless enforcement would lead to many needless intrusions of officiating into the game. But too lax enforcement allows players to game the system.
There is a lot at stake in all this. With leadership from players like Nadal and Clijsters, the sport has a chance to consolidate a culture more like golf's, in which courtesy and sportsmanship not only prevail but extend to the willingness of most players to call penalties on themselves when they see that they have broken a rule, even inadvertently. The sport itself is understood to be larger and more fundamental than the outcome of a particular match or tournament, even with so much money at stake. It is unrealistic to expect tennis players to act against their self-interest, but they can be expected not to act dishonestly.
Earlier in the summer Novak Djokovic upheld a still higher standard, when he practically overruled an 'out' call that had gone against his opponent Andy Roddick. Roddick was up a set, but Djokovic had game point to remain up a break in the second set--in other words, it was a key, possibly even a pivotal point. Djokovic thought the ball had hit the line, so he gestured to Roddick that a challenge would be worthwhile. The challenge was upheld; the point and eventually the game went to Roddick, who also won the match.
It's not the outcome that shows the meaning of Djokovic's gesture. He acted instinctively, ethically, and for the most part counter-culturally. Many fans will fault him, even patronize him for jeopardizing and losing a game and probably a set that he could have won. Baseball and football players routinely try to trick umpires and refs into believing that they have caught balls that were only trapped (or worse). If a replay showed a player indicating to an official that a call had wrongly gone for his team, one can imagine the response in the clubhouse after the game. (Of course, a team outcome is at stake in those sports, whereas Djokovic was risking only his own advancement.)
It is not unrealistic to expect tennis to carry out a thoughtful study of the still relatively new system of challenges. Since the challenges themselves are entertaining, perhaps the rule could be amended to grant an additional one or two per set but officials could be stricter about requiring the challenges to be quick. Perhaps the coaches should not be seated so close to the court or should be fined or excluded if they collaborate in evading the rules.
Tennis doesn't need to undermine the good with a stretch for the perfect, but it would benefit from a higher level of consensus and from willing obedience to its own rules. In too many sports the no-brainer commitment to victory not only over the opponent but at the expense of the sport itself (as embodied in its rules and the spirit of its rules) is a poignant aspect of our culture. Tennis can help to push back against this impoverished norm. It is time for the players' representatives and the officials to talk these issues through and see whether they can come to and codify a less contentious protocol.
Tennis Ethics part 2
(unpublished letter to editor of NYT)
To the Editor: Paul Kedrosky's
"Challenge, Anyone?" (Sept. 21) is wrong-headed on two counts. First, he exaggerates the error rate of the linesmen. That challenges are wrong more than two-thirds of the time and that there is no occasion for a challenge even on most close calls, means that the calls are preponderantly right. The challenge system is the helpful backup it was meant to be, a concession to the impossibility of getting every call right when one is trying to gauge within a millimeter or two the exact landing point of a ball traveling over a hundred miles an hour. Second, worse, he holds up a player like Francisco Verdasco, who sees the ball well and does not abuse the system, for not challenging more often. Kedrosky views this as a missed opportunity not only to gain a conjectural additional key point per match but to disrupt the opponent's rhythm or "take a short breather," one disallowed by the rules. In urging players to see challenges as an opportunity for bad faith, he puts gamesmanship ahead of the game and undermines the recovering culture of tennis.
To the Editor: Paul Kedrosky's
"Challenge, Anyone?" (Sept. 21) is wrong-headed on two counts. First, he exaggerates the error rate of the linesmen. That challenges are wrong more than two-thirds of the time and that there is no occasion for a challenge even on most close calls, means that the calls are preponderantly right. The challenge system is the helpful backup it was meant to be, a concession to the impossibility of getting every call right when one is trying to gauge within a millimeter or two the exact landing point of a ball traveling over a hundred miles an hour. Second, worse, he holds up a player like Francisco Verdasco, who sees the ball well and does not abuse the system, for not challenging more often. Kedrosky views this as a missed opportunity not only to gain a conjectural additional key point per match but to disrupt the opponent's rhythm or "take a short breather," one disallowed by the rules. In urging players to see challenges as an opportunity for bad faith, he puts gamesmanship ahead of the game and undermines the recovering culture of tennis.
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