#I also found out that a particular scholar found the book very gay and everyone was shocked | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

skruttet · 4 years

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I flicked through the Tuula Karjalainen book and read bits and pieces of it already and there’s this one section about homosexuality in it that I found really interesting so I thought I’d post it here, even though it’s a bit long oops, in case any of y’all were interested in reading it! Like, I never knew Tove had a gay cousin whom Tove was supportive of in terms of her lesbian identity and whose partner wrote a dissertation on Tove’s books?? So fascinating! Also was not expecting the sentence “The Hattifatteners resemble a wandering flock of penises or condoms”; usually they’re referred to more subtly with words like ‘phallic’ but not here xD

OPEN AND CLOSED

Many researchers have looked for references to homosexuality in Tove’s writings. Although she did not talk about it in public, she made no attempt to conceal it either, and her relationship with Tuulikki Pietilä was known to everyone. The two women took part in official state events such as the President’s Independence Day ball, where they were clearly the first to attend the event officially as a lesbian couple. Their relationship was so open and obvious it was that it was not newsworthy. It was hard to build a scandal on something that everyone knew - even the press, which liked to chase stories of that kind.

Psychological explanations of various kinds often have a chapter of their own in the analyses of Tove’s books, and sometimes unusual views have been expressed. The Swedish scholar Barbro K. Gustafsson earned her doctorate in 1992 from Uppsala University’s Theological Faculty with a dissertation on Tove’s books for adults. She made a special study of The Doll’s House, Sun City, ‘The Great Journey’ and Fair Play, and although her thesis also covered the Moomin stories, they were dealt with more briefly.

Perhaps surprisingly, Tove agreed to be interviewed by Gustafsson during her research work, and even participated in it actively by attending Gustafsson’s dissertation defence. The fact that Tove was prepared to do this may partly be explained by a family connection: Gustafsson was the partner of Tove’s beloved cousin Kerstin. When Kerstin, from a religious family, had realised that she was lesbian, Tove had been extremely supportive. Tove and her friends also helped Kerstin with many issues related to her lesbian identity.

Tove refused to give any public interviews about the dissertation defence, and did not want to talk about her private life or relationships. She returned to Finland as soon as the defence and the celebrations for Gustafsson’s Ph.D. were over, though she did issue a press release. In it she followed convention, thanking Gustafsson for the clarity of her book and her extensive knowledge of the subject - she had, Tove thought, succeeded in uncovering a rarely explored area of the unconscious. She also said that though much was written about authors, it was perhaps best done after their death, if at all. As if to soften the blow, she stressed the degree of trust between herself and Gustafsson. She said that following the progress of the research had been like an adventure, and that it had almost allowed her to see herself as a pioneer.

In her study, Gustafsson focuses on a dream that Tove had in the 1930s and found strangely threatening. In it she had seen large, black, wolf-like dogs on a seashore at sunset. A psychologist had explained to her that the dream was about repressed drives and forbidden sensuality.

In her thesis, Gustafsson is perhaps prone to detect elements of homosexuality too easily in very ordinary matters connected with the sea and archipelago life. She also discussed the wild animals that Tove often returned to both in the Moomin books and in her works for adults. In Moominland Midwinter the dog Sorry-oo wants to join the wolves and learn to howl like them. The story concerns the desire to leave the species into which one has been born, something that proves impossible. In The True Deceiver, the wolfhound plays a central role in the power relationship between the two women. Numerous readers have seen allusions to homosexuality in the comic strip about a little dog that falls in love with a cat. It realises that the love is wrong and becomes depressed. In the end the cat turns out to be a dog in disguise. This time the problem has a simple solution.

In Tove’s books there are repeated descriptions of people or Moominvalley creatures becoming ‘electric’, and this is clearly an important theme in her writing. The Hattifatteners resemble a wandering flock of penises or condoms - in thunderstorms they become electric, and then burn anyone who gets close to them. It is very easy to imagine that the electrification is an allegory for oestrus. The Mymble is also able to become electric - with her countless children she is the most sensual character in Moominvalley. The Whomper Toft in Moominvalley in November is the master of thunder and lightning. He lets the Creature out of a locked cupboard, and all that remains is a smell of electricity. The Creature runs away and grows even larger during thunderstorms, when lightning fills the sky, but is too big, angry and bewildered to be so big and angry. In ‘The Doll’s House’, electrification brings about a drama of jealousy between three men that leads to violence. There is a similar outcome in ‘The Great Journey’, where the mother feels the electrifying presence of her daughter’s female friend, whereupon the daughter becomes jealous.

Fair Play is a book about the relationship between two women in their seventies who are set in their ways, and their daily life together. Gustafsson uses the narrative to examine their mutual roles in the light of the old custom of categorising lesbians either as ‘femmes’ or ‘butches’, the latter having more masculine traits - a way of seeing a relationship between two women as a copy of a heterosexual one. Jonna and her prototype Tuulikki correspond to the ‘butch’ profile. Tove also portrayed Tuulikki as Moominvalley’s Too-ticky, a rather burly, masculine figure who keeps a knife in her belt.

Quoting Lord Alfred Douglas and the line of verse that was mentioned at the indecency trial of Oscar Wilde, Gustafsson writes that homosexual love is the love that does not dare speak its name. Although the time in which Tove lived was quite different from Wilde’s, there were similar prejudices and tensions in society - and, of course, they influenced her writing. Over the centuries women were not expected to write blatant erotic descriptions, but had instead to express themselves in allegorical terms. It was supposed that they did experience such feelings - and even more so when they were the result of unlawful love.

Tove’s books contain no openly erotic episodes or writing of a sexual nature and in this her writing is typical of women’s literature of her time. Sometimes it feels as though the characters in her books have to some extent been freed from sexuality. Their relationships are based more on understanding and friendship than on ardent passion, though their jealousy can sometimes take violent forms. Many things are veiled in highly metaphorical language. In the books that Tove wrote for adults, male and female couples are portrayed interchangeably without particular emphasis. In many of her books, as in her life, homosexuality was so natural that there was no need to make a fuss about it. While it was not to be denied, it was not to be given a high profile either. It was almost as though she backed out of dealing with her sexuality too openly, and in fact she forbade her biographer to write about her love affairs. Since the biography was written for children, this kind of advance censorship was possible.

In the story ‘The Great Journey’ (’Den stora resan’), two women in their seventies, Rosa and Elena, together with Rosa’s mother, live a life of humdrum joys and sorrows and work on their creative tasks. Among all three, physical love is a taboo subject. Elena asks Rosa: ‘What does she know, in any case? Nothing. She doesn’t know anything about such matters.’ The two women are unable to show their feelings for each other if Rosa’s mother is present. They plan a holiday together, but Rosa changes her mind and goes away with her mother instead. She remembers the promise she made in the nursery: ‘I’ll take you with me, I’ll steal you from Papa, we’ll go to a jungle or sail out on the Mediterranean... I’ll build you a castle where you shall be queen.’

Organisations that promoted sexual equality in Finland and the Nordic countries gave Tove awards for her pioneering work on behalf of sexual minorities, and she has certainly been an extremely important role model and author in the gay community. She had the ability to be completely open, yet at the same time quite private - as in the case of the dissertation, when she gave Gustafsson interviews and took part in the defence, but would not agree to answer questions from journalists who were interested in her private life. In relation to her lesbian identity, as shown by this very situation, she sometimes came out of the closet, and at other times she concealed the truth.

Tove’s homosexuality inspired a great many researchers and readers to look for the most varied interpretations. Perhaps her slightly sardonic attitude to this excessive interest can be seen in her song ‘Psychomania’ (’Psykofnattvisan’), written in 1963 for the revue Krasch and set to music by Erna Tauro. The song is like an obscure parody, in which psychoanalytic terms form a wild, cacophonous reality all of their own. It is as though she is drifting among people who are intently looking for something and who begin to see the signs of it everywhere. In fact, they can no longer see anything else because their heads are filled with ‘psychomania’. The song is a lengthy one, and operates on many levels. It also demonstrates that its author was familiar with the psychological terminology of the day - Tove had always been fascinated by interpretations of the human mind and she knew the terminology back to front, so well in fact that she could play with it:

I pore and pore and where I pore the symbols gather more and more I sink right through the floor into depression and tendentious apperception...

-Tove Jansson: Work and Love by Tuula Karjalainen

#tove jansson #moomins #LGBT+#krasch #work and love

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kunsthalextracity · 4 years

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The History of Queer Nightlife in Antwerp: Self-Interview in a Convex Mirror

In the framework of the group exhibition ‘Daily Nightshift’, Kunsthal Extra City collaborated with the Urban Studies Institute of the University of Antwerp on a lecture series. Due to COVID-19 we unfortunately couldn’t allow these lectures to take place at our premises.

To replace his lecture, professor Bart Eeckhout wrote an interview with himself.

In his text Eeckhout, board member of the Urban Studies Institute at the University of Antwerp, researches the history of queer nightlife in Antwerp and the spatial shifts that have occurred along the way. Where in the city were sexual minorities able to make contact? In what kind of places of entertainment? How did these change in shape and location? Which material traces of this nightlife remain?

Text & images: Bart Eeckhout

The History of Queer Nightlife in Antwerp: Self-Interview in a Convex Mirror

Q. So, professor, before Covid-19 changed everyone’s plans, you were going to give a lecture about the history of queer nightlife in Antwerp as part of the public program for the exhibition?

A. Well, not quite a lecture.

Q. But you were going to entertain our audience with lots of slides and flashy pictures?

A. Not really. As a matter of fact, I was wondering how to turn the presentation into something more than the delivery of an academic text, something that could satisfy an audience that is drowning in audiovisual information. The thing is that I saw myself forced to talk about a topic that is hard to illustrate, and to do so moreover as an amateur historian.

Q. How do you mean?

A. I actually teach English and American literature. But I happen to be the only board member of the Urban Studies Institute at the University of Antwerp who is simultaneously on the board of A*, the network of colleagues who specialize in gender and sexuality studies. There I have a reputation for being into queer studies and for stimulating the collaboration between queer academics and activists, since I consider myself to be both.

Q. And so the organizers came knocking on your door to ask if you could speak to the topic of queer nightlife in Antwerp?

A. Yes. And I accepted to do so because I have coincidentally been acquiring some expertise on the topic. Last year a colleague with whom I love to collaborate at the university, the media scholar Alexander Dhoest, got an invitation to contribute a chapter on Antwerp for an international book on gay neighborhoods in cities around the world – what used to be called “gay ghettoes.” We remembered that a PhD student of ours, the musicologist Rob Herreman, had spent a lot of time in archives to find out more about the recent history of LGBTQs in Antwerp in relation to music. Though we were hesitant to venture into terrain that should ideally be explored by skilled historians, we’re not aware of any Flemish colleagues doing academic research into recent LGBTQ history, certainly not with a specific focus on Antwerp. In addition, the book for which we were invited was being put together by architects and would thus probably cut us some slack. So we realized that the case of Antwerp would get attention in the collection only if we were willing to undertake the job ourselves.

Accepting to write the chapter has meant that we were forced to immerse ourselves quickly in the materials and sources we had at our disposal so as to develop a critical narrative that would meet the minimum requirements of academic scholarship. We were primarily interested in all the things we might learn from the exercise.

Q. And did you learn a few things?

A. I certainly hope so! One thing we hypothesized from the start is that the Anglo-American way of understanding gay neighborhoods would be only partially applicable to Antwerp, at best. And that is also what we argued at the more theoretical level. If you want to look for queer forms of geographic clustering in a Flemish city such as Antwerp, you should omit a lot of the social functions you find historically in the gay neighborhoods of New York or San Francisco. The “reverse diaspora” of sexual minorities from the countryside to the city that underpinned these metropolitan neighborhoods in the US never took place to the same extent, or in the same manner, in Flanders or Belgium.

In addition, a historic city such as Antwerp is relatively small by international standards. Getting around, even on foot or by bicycle, is easy, so that there’s no urgent need to choose particular residential areas if you happen to be queer. For these and several other reasons, the first thing to note about gay neighborhoods in Antwerp is that there was never anything more than some spatially clustered nightlife.

Q. Let’s talk for a moment about that nightlife then. How easy was it to go back in time to undertake your investigation?

A. That was one of the difficulties. It’s not as if you can simply fall back on standard published histories of queer life in Belgium or Flanders, let alone histories that deal specifically with Antwerp. The larger context isn’t so hard to sketch, but the specifics are a bit of a problem. When you research the history of public sex in Antwerp – by which in this case I mean the institutional environment for nondomestic sexual interactions among citizens – it isn’t hard to figure out how the first red-light district emerged during the city’s historic heyday in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. As this red-light district catered primarily to sailors, it was understandably located close to the river, in the narrow streets just north of the City Hall that came to be known as the Schipperskwartier or Skippers Quarter.

This much is standard knowledge. But how did same-sex interactions ever figure into that lusting, lawless, lowlife milieu? What might possibly be the historic sources in which you might find reliable evidence for same-sex intercourse taking place in this environment? There isn’t much you can go by. You must hope that somewhere a slight flicker will flare up to evoke a fleeting image of what might have been going on. Let me illustrate this by showing the invisibility of our topic at its most palpable. Here’s the picture of a street in the former Skippers Quarter. Do you recognize it?

Q. Not immediately.

A. Don’t blame yourself. Though I personally love to roam through all the little streets of Antwerp’s historic center, I must confess I had never bothered to walk through this one before my research took me there. It’s called the Gorter Street and it’s a very short, narrow, one-way street that is about as bland and uninteresting as you can imagine. Do you see the red-brick house in the middle of the image? That wasn’t always there, of course. If we can trust the history of house numbers, it stands where previously the Crystal Palace was to be found, a gay bar whose building collapsed, literally, sometime in the 1960s. But before the Crystal Palace was a gay bar, it was a luxury brothel, as far back as the turn of the twentieth century and even earlier. And that’s where we were able to locate our first piece of not entirely reliable evidence for same-sex goings-on – not entirely reliable because it requires a detour via the fictive world of novels and a willingness to fill in the blanks. What do you remember about the Flemish writer Georges Eekhoud?

Q. Not much.

A. He was our own Oscar Wilde, if you like – the first famous gay writer in Flanders who, like Wilde, had to defend himself in court. Unfortunately, he wrote in French, which means we’ve forgotten him even more efficiently than if he’d written in Dutch. Anyway, he published a novel in 1888, La nouvelle Carthage, in which he appears to evoke this particular brothel in great detail as a cave full of mirrors in which “all stages of debauchery” took place. Given his own sexual orientation, it’s very easy to imagine that these must have included same-sex interactions, but in his description Eekhoud preferred to remain coy about the sexual acts, so that it’s really for our own 21st-century imaginations to flesh out the specifics.

Q. So for what period did you find the first evidence of same-sex activities in the Skippers Quarter that didn’t take the form of literary fiction but of nonfictional testimony?

A. We had to jump to the first half of the twentieth century for that. Mainly, what we then find is people testifying to drag performances taking place in the Skippers Quarter. Our favorite example is that of Danny’s Bar, a notorious bar for sailors where both the owner and his male staff were dressed as women and the sailors were being tempted into maximum binging.

On an online forum for retired sailors, we found some very juicy recollections of the kind of ritual that typically went on in this bar – how young sailors were being lured in as a sort of prank by older sailors, how these youngsters tended to be awestruck by the Hollywood-star prettiness of the women, and how they would be made to drink so much (and sometimes be drugged as well) until they woke up in bed upstairs only to find they had been sleeping with a man. It’s fair to speculate that some of the visiting sailors must have known they were going to be able to sleep with a man at Danny’s Bar and must have returned to the place to experiment with sexual desires and gender identities that fell outside the mainstream norms of their day and age.

Q. Are there any signs left of Danny’s Bar?

A. Not unless you have x-ray vision. The street is now almost entirely residential, though there is a modern-day “brasserie” in the house where the bar used to be. If walls could talk!

Q. These recollections of Danny’s Bar take us automatically into the second half of the twentieth century, I guess?

A. Yes they do. On the eve of the Second World War, we know that the Skippers Quarter had acquired a gay connotation to those in the know. Yet it didn’t stick to that area. After the war, its gay nightlife started to spread beyond the city’s traditional red-light district. A few of these new bars were still nearby, in the area around the Cathedral and the City Hall, but the majority sprang up close to the Central Station. This is also when we’re beginning to see some diversification. The Shakespeare, for instance, was a bar in the historic center. On the one hand, it was still occasionally visited by sailors and sex workers. On the other, and more importantly, it had a female bartender and gradually came to attract a female crowd – a niche for which there hadn’t been a market yet in the Skippers Quarter.

Meanwhile, in the working-class streets leading toward the Central Station, a number of bars were opening that were all operated by men and served a male clientele – places like Fortunia, Week-End (later known as La Vie en Rose), and La Ronde. These were generally small operations. One of the streets, the Van Schoonhovenstraat, would go on to sport more than twenty such gay bars. In this picture I recently took, you get a sense of what this may have been like when you look at the structure of the street front, for instance the houses in the middle painted in blue and mauve (one of them surviving as a sex shop):

But the Van Schoonhovenstraat wasn’t the only street. Even if nearly all of the area’s gay bars have in turn disappeared, you might still recognize this iconic place, the one with the greatest staying power and cult status:

Q. Ah yes, Café Strange! It’s in the Dambruggestraat, right?

A. Yes, and it still allows you to step into a time machine and take a trip down memory lane. We used it as our prime architectural case study, because its history shows you a lot about such gay bars in the second half of the twentieth century. A few facts and details hopefully help bring this history to life.

Café Strange was started by a gay couple as a gay-friendly “brasserie” back in 1955. The name, “Strange,” was meant to be suggestive without being explicit. In those years, the curtains behind the windows were still systematically drawn so that no passerby could look inside. You couldn’t just step inside either, but had to knock or ring a bell and wait for someone to let you in. To expedite this process, a small porch was constructed so that you could first step into the anonymous porch, close the door behind you and then open the door to the actual café – all with an eye to being as discrete as possible.

Over the years, the bar became so successful that its interior had to be reorganized and expanded so that it could accommodate not only a buffet at the back but also make some space for a dance floor. The café had a good reputation for many years until one of the owners died in the mid-seventies and his remaining partner got into various kinds of trouble that ended dramatically with his getting killed. It was then that a new gay couple, Armand and Roger, took over – you probably know Armand as the remaining owner. This was in 1980, in the era of early emancipation, and so they decided to be less discrete by painting the building’s façade in a sort of pink and adding a drawing of a sexy sailor on the outside. Inside, pictures of semi-naked and naked men were hung on the walls. The buffet was moved to the front of the room and a professional DJ was hired to turn the place into a small part-time disco. For a while, the owners even produced their own little magazine to inform gay patrons about leisure opportunities – remember that this was before the internet made looking up such information a piece of cake.

The first decades under the new owners went well: the place had the reputation of being at the same time modern, unpretentious, and laid back. There were a lot of flamboyant theme parties in which patrons could win grand prizes such as a flight to Athens or a weekend in Amsterdam or Paris. What’s interesting to observe also about the history of Café Strange is the shift in demographic over the years: while in the 1980s you could find a mix of gays, lesbians, and bisexuals from a wide range of ages and social classes in the bar, this narrowed down in the 1990s to mostly gay men, and then by the new millennium morphed again into a mix of gay and gay-friendly visitors. Indeed, by the nineties, these smaller gay bars in especially the area close to the station were increasingly being pushed out of business by a new type of venue, such as The Hessenhuis.

A building with a totally different allure, of course. It’s originally from 1564 and part of the city’s historical patrimony. After undergoing renovation in 1975, it reopened as a temporary exhibition space, and then in 1993 a gay-friendly bar opened that doubled at night as a club for mainly gay youngsters. Soon, the Hessenhuis became one of their two favorite commercial nightlife venues, together with the Red & Blue. This new generation of larger, trendier, more spectacular, and essentially self-contained clubs gradually drove the small gay bars out of the market, and thus also put an end to the sense of a particular neighborhood or area in which many such bars were clustered.

Today, much of the city’s history of gay and lesbian nighttime entertainment has evaporated and become materially invisible in the streetscape. There was a time, during the second half of the twentieth century, that Antwerp contained literally dozens of gay and lesbian bars, but almost none of these survive now. Unfortunately, I’m not aware that anyone is actively trying to honor this material history by installing commemorative plaques or making exhibitions about it. It survives mostly in the memory of an aging cohort of participants, hence my insistence at the outset about the relative difficulty of bringing my topic to life to a younger generation raised on a constant stream of immersive images. But perhaps now that Alexander, Rob, and I have made our first archeological efforts and undertaken a basic form of mental mapping, a curious young historian will come along to flesh out our very schematic findings and dig up all the beautiful, funny, and naughty traces of queer nightlife that may still be hiding in public and private archives. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?

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veridium · 6 years

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OC Interview Meme

I have been tagged by @dickeybbqpit to do this wonderful interview, this time I will be doing it for everyone’s favorite petite, sweet badass, Olivia!

I am tagging @orlesianbard, @wardenofmyheart, and @ladylike-foxes but if you have already done one already I’m sorry! whoops!

This is an UNNOFFICIAL face-claim that I am having stand-in for an image since I do not have access to playing DA:I right now in order to craft her character!

1. What is your name?

Well, that would be Olivia.

2. What is your real name?

...Olivia? Oh, I’m so silly, you’re probably suggesting my full name. That would be Olivia Berenice Sinclair.

3. Do you know why you were called that?

My father got to choose my first name, but my mother insisted that ‘Berenice’ be put in somewhere. It’s funny to think I was almost a Berenice, actually! I wonder what my nicknames would be? Hm. Well, my name also means ‘peaceful victory,’ which is a testament to my father’s virtues. If only he knew who he was naming.

4. Are you single or taken?

Oh my goodness, *laughs* how hilarious would it be if I were to tell you I had no sweetheart, if Cassandra heard? She would be so bothered. But, I suppose that means I should say I am happily in love with someone. A certain Seeker who looks very attractive when she’s sparring, and filing reports, and...well, most everything she does.

5. Have any abilities or powers? Besides the power of persuasion? Oh yes, silly, I am a Mage. I did not develop any particular elemental abilities when I was in the Circle -- I preferred Apothecary and Natural sciences. I can make most anything blow to smithereens, or turn to mush, or chemically break down. That is a hard-won skill, I must say. The construction personnel here are not particularly fond of me, now.

7. What’s your eye color?

They are a light hazel, though the Seeker insists they are honey-gold. Oh, whoops, *giggles* should I have not said that? Does that complicate her tough persona?

8. How about your hair color?

Blonde, like my father’s. It was very fair when I was small, but gradually it’s turned darker.

9. Have you any family members?

Hm, well, yes. My father passed many years ago, but I imagine my mother is still alive and well -- I would have received a letter dictating the contrary otherwise. She lives on our small estate in the northeastern countryside of Orlais. Then there are my relations on either side of my family tree, though I was never very close with them. My cousin was the only one I had contact with, and she has recently passed.

10. Oh? What about pets?

Oh, no no, not for me. I could scarcely find the time! I like going for walks out on the trails and watching the wildlife just fine. I don’t need any other tasks to manage. Although, I must say, it would be adorable to have Cassandra be around a puppy, don’t you think?

11. That’s cool I guess, now tell me about something you don’t like.

Oh, my, well. That would be...hm. Men who think they know more than me because they see I am pretty, and petite, and kind. Most Orlesian food, besides those little chocolate pastries, uh, I can’t remember the name. The Ambassador would know.

Other than that, I suppose unkind people? I really don’t pick things to dislike in my life, they find me.

12. Do you have any hobbies/activities you like doing?

Making explosive substances is always riveting. But, when I’m not hard at work, I enjoy bathing with candles, reading, walking around the fortress...sometimes, I sit by the fire with Varric and he tells me about his writing. Don’t tell Cassandra, but I know what happens in the next book of Swords & Shields.

13. Ever hurt anyone before?

Yes, yes, but is that really a rarity around here? I can’t find a person who is a tried and true pacifist. Also, if you have done the work I’ve done, and made end’s meat like I have had to, you find nonviolence to be an impossibility.

14. Ever… killed anyone before?

..Technically?

15. What kind of animal are you?

Animal? I could tell you the human speciation term, if that is what you are referring to. But, I am confused as to what you are referring to other than that.

16. Name your worst habits.

Oh, drats. I’m a terrible workaholic. Really, I could spend overnight hours here in the tower if I get a project that I an enthusiastic about. I am also very silly and clumsy, I’m afraid. If it isn’t precise measurements or recipes, I tend to knock into things or stumble.

17. Do you look up to anyone at all?

Plenty of people! My friends, Veronica, Naomi, and Theia, the Inquisitor. They are strong and wonderful souls, and I am so blessed to have them in my life. Cassandra, because she is so brilliant and just...well, just amazing. Vivienne, because she is so endlessly confident in herself. Dorian, because his humor is wonderful and he is terribly intelligent.

I suppose the better question would be who I don’t admire!

18. Gay, straight, or bisexual?

Hm. I love people, I do, but...I would be content never knowing the attention of a man ever again. With Cassandra I feel as though that is no longer a concern, but, I would say I prefer women.

19. Do you go to school?

Yes, I was a very attentive scholar. My mother sent me to school in the Capitol when I was of age, and before that I was tutored. I showed great promise in the performing arts, so when I got a bit older my schooling was focused on those talents most of all.

Truth be told, I consider my time in the Circle the most educationally nourishing time of my life. It was where I found something I was passionate about, and now I am here serving the Inquisition with all that I learned.

20. Do you ever want to marry and have kids one day?

Marriage was one of the first virtues ever instilled in me, so I...hm, I really don’t know if I have an objective taste for it! I think if the conditions were right, and I felt like I wasn’t giving up a life I wanted to lead, it would be something I would consider.

Children...children, I don’t know. I don’t believe I learned from the right person how to mother, and thus I am not confident motherhood is my fate. There is so much of this world to see, and so much to do, besides be a mother. I could easily spend the rest of my days finding out what all those things are, and not bring a child into this world.

*Laughter* I just imagined what it would be like to proposition Cassandra about parenthood and just the image of her complexion turning to snow, it’s priceless! I may have to steal that question.

21. Do you have any fanboys/fangirls?

Besides the children that insist I be their best friend, I suppose not. I am a controversial person here, I believe. A former harlot and Circle Mage, who has no ensnared the heart of one of the most faithful Chantry figures who could be the next Divine? That does not exactly make me the world’s favorite person.

Surely, I don’t see why not, though. I consider myself a splendid person.

22. What are you most afraid of?

Veronica and Theia when they get into arguments. Naomi and I have to almost threaten freezing them to opposite walls in order to get them to cease. Other than that, I don’t have any real fears.

...Okay, well, my dreams would suggest otherwise, but I am not defined by my trauma as a Mage. I believe fears to be unexplored understandings.

23. What do you usually wear?

I have a couple dresses that are simple and practical, that I wear day-to-day. When I travel, it is typically to the Capitol, so I wear more fitted and formal attire. But, for all other excursions, I prefer a light patented armor I had specifically made for me. It is nimble, flexible, and sturdy -- and I must say, makes my butt end look positively delectable.

Nothing beats a masterful seamstress. Absolutely nothing!

24. Do you love someone?

Yes, I love many people! Well, alright, I struggled with romantic love for a long time. I had signed myself away to a life of no real romance, and no true love, to protect myself. I felt calloused from my upbringing along with my experiences as a rogue harlot.

Now, though? Love has been redefined for me, and I intend on exploring its depths for as long as I can. It helps to have someone who inspires such a new direction in your life.

25. When was the last time you wet yourself?

Oh, never! Never, ever, surely. How could you ask such a silly thing? *Giggles.*

Although, on many an occasion, I have stained my dresses in such a way where it looks like I had an accident. Those always make Cassandra chuckle when I come back from the tower.

26. Well, it’s not over yet!

What fun this has been, I’ve never been interviewed about my life in such a way before!

27. What class are you? (High class, middle class, low class)

Well, being a Mage, I am pretty nomadic in life. But, I was born into a comfortable gentry life with my family, so, I could say I’ve experienced multiple areas of class in my short life. I don’t need wealth, though, as much as I have depended on its proximity. I like a quiet life where I can do what I want to do.

28. How many friends do you have?

Oh, many! Many dear friends in my life, whom I adore. There’s the girls, and then some of the allies in the Inquisition -- have you by chance met Cole? He’s such a dear. Ambassador Montilyet and I have much in common. Vivienne and I have struck a good reporte as well.

Friends are wonderful, and I am fortunate to have them in this stressful and uncertain time.

29. What are your thoughts on pie?

Oh! My goodness, you reminded me that tonight there is to be thindleberry pie in the kitchens. I have to bring several spices for it before dusk hits, or else it’ll be terribly bland.

Pie? Pie is delicious. The crust bottom is the best part.

30. Favourite drink?

Honeyed tea, just warm enough to make my tongue tingle!

31. What’s your favourite place?

Somewhere in the countryside with pastureland and woodlands. Oh, and anywhere the Seeker is. *giggles*

32. Are you interested in someone?

Yes, of course. I am interested in you, for example. Where did you come from, and why did you search me out of all people?

33. What’s your bra cup size and/or how big is your willy?

*Giggles* Precisely one-Seeker’s-hand’s worth.

34. Would you rather swim in the lake or the ocean?

Lake, because that would suggest there is lush land around it, and I love valleys and meadows where there are flowers and trees to enjoy.

35. What’s your type?

Someone honorable, who is passionate about what they do! I cannot be with anyone who is apathetic or uninterested in life’s intricacies. Someone who is kindhearted and has respectable virtues. Someone who loves to be impulsive and silly sometimes! There has to be sweetness to balance out life’s bitterness.

Oh, and I have to say, if they have dark hair and battle scars, that also melts my lard, if you know what I mean.

36. Any fetishes?

*Laughs* No! I don’t need them to be creative.

37. Seme or uke? Top or Bottom? Dominant or Submissive?

I prefer the term “Persuasive.” But also, I’m afraid I’m far too flexible and nimble to simply remain on a pillow. I have talents, and just because I’m no longer utilizing them to survive, doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy partaking in them.

Plus, it is thrilling to find out what makes someone with an assertive and dominant personality feel more...comfortable. *giggles*

38. Camping or indoors?

Camping, certainly! And with those wonderful fleece blankets that come out of the Hinterlands? Agh, there is nothing more beautifully engrossing.

39. Are you wanting the interview to end?

I mean, no, but I do have a kettle of jasper elixir on the fire and it is temperamental once it gets to a certain temperature. Oh, I should show you what it is when we are done here! It turns water into....well, you’ll see!

40. Now it’s over!

Oh, splendid! Let’s go, I have much to show you!

Thank you again for tagging me!

#oc stuff #olivia sinclair #oc meme #long post #I love bby Olivia

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scripttorture · 7 years

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Sources

So this isn’t exactly a Masterpost. Good sources on torture are hard to find and it’s not always obvious what they cover. I’ve had a couple of people recommend fictional titles in the comments and while fiction can be helpful for working out how to handle torture in stories it is rarely accurate and no substitute for factual sources.

I thought it might be helpful to give everyone a quick run down of the sources I’ve found most useful and what they cover.

This may well be edited in the future as I find more books. :)

Torture and Democracy by D Rejali

This is basically the book on torture.

It’s the size of a breezeblock.

Rejali covers torturers and victims, provides a systematic breakdown of why torture fails, gives a history of electrical torture, an analysis of factors that encourage torture in society and an overview of how the law fails torture victims. Interrogation is extensively covered.

This book covers torture in the modern era globally and in that area it is very thorough. Historical torture is not extensively covered.

But for a thorough understanding of the topic and modern torture, Rejali is a must.

Why Torture Doesn’t Work: The Neuroscience of Interrogation by S O’Mara

O’Mara’s book is much more focused on science than Rejali’s. It is a point by point analysis of some of the most common ‘clean’ (ie non-scarring) torture techniques used today, explaining exactly how harmful they are and debunking claims that they’re not ‘real’ torture.

O’Mara’s speciality is the brain and he uses his knowledge to show the biological under-pinings of why torture can not work.

An excellent source on torture generally and a brilliant explanation of how pain, memory and distress work. This is useful for writing any traumatic event but doesn’t cover a wide range of torture techniques and is very Western-focused in its approach.

Cruel Britannia: A Secret History of Torture by I Cobain

While I have some problems with Cobain’s book he remains an excellent source.

My problems are pretty simple, Cobain’s a journalist not a scholar and he often allows apologist arguments to creep into his book. He often takes torturers’ word for it and believes them when they suggest that valuable information can come from torture.

Rejali and O’Mara will tell you why that’s wrong.

But the interviews in this book are incredibly valuable. Cobain interviews victims and torturers and sets them in a wider political context, showing how governments have supported or ignored torture.

His interviews on the London Cage and the collected work on Ireland, Aden, Cyprus and the Mau-Mau is well worth a look for anyone interested in those conflicts in particular or the British ‘National Style’ of torture in general.

Sourcebook on Solitary Confinement by S Shalev

Shalev’s Sourcebook is a free resource that’s available online and an excellent break down of the damage solitary confinement causes.

While this is obviously focused on one technique this Sourcebook contains pretty much all the information you could want on solitary.

The majority of the data comes from US prisons and the book is obviously biased towards confinement in a prison context. But the discussion of symptoms, risk factors and long term effects makes this utterly invaluable.

Any author who writes about solitary confinement or isolation should consult at least the second chapter.

Mao’s Great Famine by F Dikötter

One of the best books on famine in print.

The style is somewhat impersonal, but I think that works in its favour. The focus is essentially on how widespread famine can occur rather than how starvation affects the individual.

The discussion on community and the role of enforcers is particularly good.

I’d recommend it for anyone writing a large-scale natural disaster or atrocity.

Amnesty International Reports (Annual 2016/2017)

Amnesty’s annual reports give good concise updates on torture globally, year by year. They are freely available online and generally contain a lot of survivor accounts.

It can be difficult to find specific information using them. You can not, for example, tell from the summaries whether particular techniques are covered. They rarely contain follow-ups on survivors and so are not a good resource for the recovery process.

But the accounts of survivors, in their own words, are invaluable.

World Food Programme

An excellent resource on starvation and malnutrition. If you want to know how a starving or malnourished character would be treated or recover this is probably the best free resource you can find.

Very good for physical effects and for descriptions of disaster relief programs. Not so great on survivor accounts or giving an idea of what starvation feels like on a personal level.

International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims

If you’ve been following my blog for a while you may have heard of these guys. Not only do they work to support torture victims but they also publish a free online journal dedicated to helping survivors recover.

Rather academic and dense, this material often requires a lot of effort and engagement. This is very much the academic side. It can be incredibly helpful, but it’s not always easy to find the information you’re after.

A Darkling Plain by K R Monroe

A collection of interviews with survivors of a wide range of atrocities, Monroe’s book shows a real range of both traumatic events and responses to them.

The main focus of the book is how people move on with their lives after atrocities and how they hold on to their sense of humanity. As such it’s incredibly useful to authors whose writing touches on these themes and authors who want to include a wider range of realistic responses to traumatic events.

Highly recommended.

The Wretched of the Earth by F Fanon

The appendix contains some of Fanon’s notes on people he treated during the Franco-Algerian war.

These notes include two torturers, a family member of a torturer, victims and relatives of victims.

This is still one of the most valuable readily accessible sources on torturers’ behaviour.

The Question by H Alleg

Alleg’s account of torture during the Franco-Algerian war is a classic for a reason. This is a lucid, often harrowing account of torture failing from a victim’s perspective.

I talk about victims refusing to cooperate. Alleg describes what it feels like from the inside.

I strongly advise anyone writing from a victim’s perspective to read this book.

We Wish to Inform you that Tomorrow we will be Killed with our Families by P Gourevitch

The Rwandan genocide. This book provides both an overview of the events, interviews with survivors and transcripts/quotes from the time period.

A difficult but important book, and extremely useful for writing conflict and war crimes.

A History of Torture by G R Scott

This book was written in the 30s and boy does it read like it was.

The casual racism and sexism is extreme and off putting however this remains one of the most thorough books on historical torture globally. Just…read it with a critical eye.

To the Kwai and Back by R Searle

This collection of war drawings is, in my opinion, Searle’s best and most affecting work.

They chronicle Searle’s experience of the Second World War as a prisoner of the Japanese. The drawings document torture, starvation, forced labour and death marches and are interspersed with Searle’s commentary and memories.

The book serves as both a survivor’s account and (as Searle is looking back) a discussion of how he as an individual recovered. It serves as a very good source on large-scale atrocities seen from a personal perspective.

Nonviolence: The History of a Dangerous Idea by M Kurlansky

The focus of this work is in the title but torture crops up in this wide ranging historical narrative time and time again.

It won’t be relevant to everyone’s stories, but I’m including this book for its numerous moving examples of people across cultures and history resisting torture, slavery and genocide without violence. We have very few fictional examples of this kind of action, and the history is rarely remembered.

I want you, my readers, to be aware of as many sources as possible so you can break the mould if you want to.

Tell Me Where I Can Be Safe: Human Rights Watch report on LGBTQ Rights in Nigeria

This is a pretty harrowing read containing a lot of rape and sexual violence as well as torture. Victim accounts are prominent and the report only covers a relatively recent period in one country.

I include this because my reading strongly suggests that it is typical of anti-LGBTQ violence across much of Africa and the Middle East. The methods and tactics used crop up across multiple countries and have been known to occur in Europe (though Gay and Trans Rights legislation has helped combat such violence).

As a result I think this is a very valuable resource for writing torture and abuse of LGBTQ people specifically and an extremely important resource for Western writers who wish to write LGBTQ characters who are not from the West.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by R Skloot

An incredibly valuable overview of unethical experimentation in modern America.

While far from a complete survey this book covers unconsenting or uninformed experimentation on minors, mental health patients, black people and prisoners.

It talks about how experiments were conducted, how subjects were chosen and the effect on both the victims and their families.

Highly recommended for anyone who wishes to write unethical experimentation.

The Horrible Histories Series by T Deary and M Brown

Yes these are children’s books and yes I am sure they deserve a place here.

With their focus on the ‘gruesome bits’ of history these books generally contain quick and accurate overviews of historical tortures. Descriptions of punishments, methods of execution and medical treatments at the time are present in almost all of these short, accessible books.

The focus is on English history as such there’s a lot that isn’t covered, but they’re very good for getting a sense of the tortures that were used during different historical periods quickly and easily.

Men and Hunger: a psychological manual for relief workers by H S Guetzkow, P H Bowman, A Keys, 1946 (The Minnesota Starvation Experiment)

This is not the full text but the 70 page summary sent out to relief workers immediately following the experiment. This covers all the important psychological and physical effects of starvation in enough detail for an author writing a starving character to find it extremely helpful. It contains a lot of specific examples of behaviours and quotes from the men involved with the experiment, giving a rounded, detailed sense of their experience.

However it does contain some racist and sexist language common during the 1940s when it was written.

UN Human Rights report on Rohingya refugees from Myanmar

This is the UN report on the on-going genocide/ethnic cleansing taking place in Myanmar.

The report contains accounts of murder, rape, gang-rape, torture and the murder of children. It also contains brief statistical analysis of the crimes survivors reported witnessing or experiencing (over half of Rohingya women reported being raped or sexually assaulted, over half of the survivors interviewed reported that a family member had been murdered).

This could be useful to people writing about ethnic cleansing and genocide. I think it gives an overview of the situation within countries where these crimes occur, giving a sense of what they’re like before, during and after these atrocities.

War Child: Reclaiming Dreams

This is a quick summary of the effects war has on children by the charity War Child. It focuses on the work they do in various countries; it aims to raise money for the charity and awareness of the causes they’re involved in.

It provides a decent, quick overview of the many factors that affect children in war; both as civilians and as combatants. It talks about how children are used by armies (pointing out that the idea of they are always forced to fight is false) and how families and children caught in the cross fire are affected.

A useful source for authors writing about children in combat zones and a good starting point for anyone planning on writing child soldiers.

The UN Standard Minimum Rules for the treatment of Prisoners, aka the Nelson Mandela Rules

This is a pretty dense legal document outlining how prisoners should be treated and the conditions that are a minimum acceptable standard for keeping them.

It’s tough reading but it could be useful for anyone planning to write about prisons and prisoners in a modern setting.

The collected works of S Kara

Kara’s research on slavery today is based on almost twenty years experience and thousands of interviews with enslaved people across continents.

He covers both individual experiences and the larger global picture of modern slavery. He covers multiple countries and slavery in different kinds of industries.

He also provides a thorough and convincing breakdown of the numbers; how many slaves there are today and where. This is accompanied by a clear analysis of how slavery has been allowed to continue and what needs to be done to stop it.

Brilliant, harrowing, necessary books that are a must for anyone writing about slavery.

Disclaimer

#tw torture #sources #solitary confinement #modern torture #historical torture #clean torture #scarring torture #unethical experimentation #starvation #famine #atrocities #homophobia #survivor accounts #torturers #behaviour of torturers

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monawriter2020-blog · 4 years

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Home Schooling: Educating the Teachers

It's 5:30 a.m. on a summer day. I should be sleeping like the rest of the world, ensconced in a woolly blanket of certitude that there is no work today, only vacation. But I can't really sleep. It's the first day of school, you see.

There is an old theory of learning that says education isn't about teaching students new things but only about reminding them what they already inherently know.

It's a high-minded theory that assumes everyone is what my old college president would have termed "educable," that knowledge, like truth, is not relative, but exists on its own plane running parallel to ours and may be accessed by revelation school leave letter for my son.

One need only be shown the hidden path to the oracle's chamber, so to speak, and all will be unveiled.

Sometimes, though, it's not the student but the teacher that needs to be shown the way.

Perhaps we are so inured to others' needs, so accustomed to our own convenience, that we modern folk oftentimes don't pay heed to the tragedies occurring before our very eyes. Particularly for parents trying to educate our children, there seems to be a wall in front of our eyes that shields us so often from the truth.

We place our children in schools in the hopes that they will learn what is needed for them to survive in this world: facts, figures, social aptitude, an inquiring mind, an entrepreneurial spirit.

And we will show up and be supportive at school assemblies, classroom field trips, endless fund-raisers, sporting events, etc., ad nauseum.

We provide classroom supplies, chaperoning, transportation, library staffing, even office support, all in hopes that we are furthering our children's education by setting a good example and freeing up the teachers to do "what they do best."

Too often, though, what parents get out of this bargain isn't what was promised. Instead of bright, energetic, go-getter scholars, what we are handed back is children who are lethargic, beaten down and drained of any creativity they once had. We get kids who are indoctrinated into political correctness -- which is to say the art of arrogant whininess -- but who can barely multiply. We get kids who have been taught in "science" class to recycle to "save" the planet, but who can't explain to you how an airplane stays in the air or how an internal combustion engine works. We get kids who have been forced to memorize Dr. Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech and participate annually in Cinco de Mayo but who can't explain one contribution of white people to the world other than bringing disease to North America.

In some schools, it's not unusual for as many as half the students to drop out before their senior high school year. Of those who hang in there, many seniors can't even pass an eighth-grade-level exit exam to get their diplomas.

And just to add to parental enjoyment, along the way, the children have almost certainly been exposed to gay sex, oral sex, premarital sex, contraception, abortion, illegal drug use, alcohol abuse, nihilism and atheism. All under the auspices of the school, and all before sixth grade -- kindergarten, if some legislators get their way. Recess and that after-school time before parents come home provide ample opportunity for kids to put into practice what they've learned in "skool."

Parents may seek relief in private schools, but often what they encounter is no better, just more expensive. If you are rich enough, it is still possible to buy your children a real education. If you're merely well-off, more likely what will happen is you will pay through the nose, and your children will receive an education that is relatively free from the sex- and drug-teaching curricula of the public schools, as well as the more violent forms of playground bullying. But for the most part, the rest of the teaching agenda is the same, particularly if you live in a state like California, where private schools are so regulated that they often just give up and use the same books, the same curricula, same time tables and same test "preparation" procedures as the public schools. If you're lucky, there might be some time to squeeze in a little religious education.

That was our experience. Not being much of a corporate yes man myself, we've often been on the lower rungs of the economic ladder. Still, we managed to put our son into private schools despite the cost. Sending him to our local public elementary school was out of the question. The first time we went to that school's office, there were three children being treated by the school nurse after getting beaten up in the halls. The second time we went to that office, the police were there having a "chat" with a boy who looked like he was in about fourth grade.

So we got our son into a local private school, with high hopes of better things. Now, when he started kindergarten, he was almost a whole year younger than the rest of his classmates because of the oddity of birthday cutoffs, but he still tested above many of them. That glowing moment didn't last long, however. Soon, we were told that our boy needed a speech therapist because he had trouble pronouncing certain syllables. We took him back to our local public school, which actually had a real speech therapist on staff, and after five minutes she pronounced not only was he normal for his age, but he was exceptionally bright and seemed like he was a few years ahead in his vocabulary, even if he couldn't quite pronounce his "th" sounds yet.

After we got over that hurdle, we learned that he was being picked on at school. Despite the school's supposedly strict "no bullies" policy, our son, who was a year younger than most of his classmates but also taller than almost all of them, was in the same classroom with a boy who was almost two years older than most of the kindergartners. So now I found myself having to explain to my gentle 5-year-old how to handle an 8-year-old developmentally challenged gorilla who liked to express himself with his fists. We finally got the principal to take action after the teacher did nothing, but at the expense of his teacher now viewing us and our son as "the enemy" for getting her in trouble.

And that was just the beginning of our experiences with private schools. At one point, our boy must have seen something on TV at the same time the class was studying Christ's Passion in school, and he made a comment to somebody, somehow, somewhere, "Oh, just kill me." I think it was because he used the wrong color crayon or something. Suddenly, our then first-grader is supposedly likely to kill himself, he could be a danger to others, yada yada. So we take him to his first shrink, who pronounces him normal but unusually imaginative and, surprise, verbally gifted, and says that the boy was just acting out something he heard. We were not really surprised, but we were still relieved that everything was normal.

Let me tell you, though, after something like that gets around, nothing's normal ever again. Suddenly, we were the pariahs who were raising the next Columbine kid. We couldn't buy a play date at that point. And our son was aware of it. He started hanging his head when he walked, playing by himself at recess, and we'd catch him calling himself "stupid" when things went awry. At that point, we had an opportunity to apply to another school. We went through all the hoops and got positive feedback from the interviewing teachers and so forth, but one of the deciding factors turned out to be a letter written to the new school by our son's kindergarten teacher. We weren't allowed to see the letter, but the tone of the interviewers changed drastically after they read it.

Fortunately, we had another opportunity to get into a different school, this one Catholic, which is our denomination. Once again, we had high hopes for better results. Once again, those hopes were dashed. Our son wound up in a classroom with a first-year teacher who right off the bat pegged him as a troublemaker for whatever reason. This teacher, we later learned, had a habit of yelling at the kids, and she took out much of her aggression on our son. He began hating school and not wanting to do the incredible amount of homework they piled on every night. The next teacher was much nicer, but by then the damage was done. Even though our boy was capable of doing his homework perfectly (when he wanted to), he regularly flunked tests because they were time-limited and he would panic because he could hear his past teacher screaming at the kids next door.

Just to add insult to injury, we finally realized that the curriculum at the school was the same state-created curriculum at public schools. They used the same texts and applied the same ridiculous schedule of 8 to 10 subjects per day, which hardly allows any time to absorb the information, much less understand it. The parents whose kids were doing well in class, we later learned, were going to Kumon classes after school. When our son needed extra help with multiplication, we were told he must be tutored. Well, the tutors at the school didn't have time for us. We approached the youth director because her teens need service credits to graduate high school. No one volunteered to tutor our son. We were finally told he MUST have a professional tutor. We were given a name, supposedly of a parishioner, but no contact information. This person was not on record with the parish or the school office. The principal, who had recommended him, never came forth with a number. We contacted the church's nuns. This particular order is charged with teaching children. That's their gig. Within five minutes, the got back to us and said one of the sisters would tutor our son, but they wanted to talk to his teacher before setting up a schedule. They talked to his teacher apparently, then suddenly they weren't available to help out.

So in the final analysis, our own church school, using lay teachers to teach state curriculum out of state textbooks, happily accepts thousands of dollars in tuition but is unable to properly teach the children math, forcing parents to supplement with either a program like Kumon or, in our case, nonexistent tutors.

We spent somewhere between $25,000 and $30,000 on tuition, uniforms and other expenses in the vain hope of giving our child a decent education. All that happened was a gaggle of overpaid strangers slowly strangled his curiosity and crushed his desire to learn, leaving him a bundle of nerves at the age of 8.

Sometimes it's the educator who needs to be reminded of what he already knows. My child is too important to me, and I think someday to the world, to leave in the hands of a capricious public or private education system that, ultimately, is designed to produce conforming drones, not thinkers. We, as his parents, cannot simply stand by and watch the life being squeezed out of him like the juice from a lemon.

The reality is that we, like most parents, have allowed this to happen for far too long because it was convenient to let our son be raised by strangers.

No more.

We had started supplementing his education with materials from a local home schooling program when he began having grade trouble and as a "backup" because of the monkey business school administrators liked to be up to, such as putting new students on "probation" for no reason.

We've decided to take the plunge and just home school. It will be a change, for sure, and a lot of responsibility, but the incredible improvement we've already seen in our boy's attitude and aptitude is making it worthwhile.

I've encountered many parents with stories similar to ours. We apparently are part of a growing movement to take back education from the millers who are running the system.

Having been through the system myself, and having seen what it nearly did to my child, I no longer believe in "reforming" the education system, reducing class sizes or raising teachers' salaries. If the government insists on dabbling in education, then what is needed is a wholesale elimination of what we have now. A replacement system would start with teachers who are trained in a subject other than "education," have an administrator-to-teacher ratio on the order of 1-to-20, eliminate the nonsensical scale of grade levels and let students achieve at their own speed in the needed skills.

#schoolleaveletterformysonsamplepattern

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deniscollins · 4 years

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The Trouble With Empathy

Does your organization assess job candidates empathy skills? If not, why not? If yes, does your organization conduct empathy training? How? Why?

When my daughter started remote kindergarten last month, the schedule sent to parents included more than reading, math, art and other traditional subjects. She’ll also have sessions devoted to “social and emotional learning.” Themes range from listening skills and reading nonverbal cues to how to spot and defuse bullying.

As millions of students start the school year at home, staring at glowing tablets, families worry that they will miss out on the intangible lessons in mutual understanding that come with spending hours a day with kids and adults outside their own household. We want children to grasp perspectives of people different from themselves. Yet in recent years, empathy — whether we can achieve it; whether it does the good we think — has become a vexed topic.

While teachers attempt to teach empathy through screens, the national context has become complicated in the months since the police killing of George Floyd. “Because our white leaders lack compassion and empathy, Black people continue to die,” wrote a columnist in The Chicago Sun-Times. When Joe Biden posted a video declaring that “the pain is too intense for one community to bear alone,” journalists called the message an effort to “project empathy” — while activists said empathy was not enough.

At the Republican National Convention, Ja’Ron Smith, a deputy assistant to President Trump, assured the audience that the president is empathizer in chief. “I just wish everyone would see the deep empathy he shows the families whose loved ones were killed due to senseless violence,” Mr. Smith said.

Few would quarrel with a kindergarten teacher’s noble efforts to teach listening skills to 5-year-olds. But as my daughter and her classmates get older, they will run into thornier dilemmas, our era’s version of old questions: Are some divides too great for common humanity to bridge? When we attempt to step into the shoes of those very different from us, do we do more harm than good? At the same time, trends in American education have worked at cross-purposes, nurturing social and emotional learning in some ways, hampering it in others.

Our capacity to see one another as fellow humans, to connect across differences, is the foundation of a liberal pluralist society. Yet skeptics say that what seems like empathy often may be another form of presumption, condescension or domination. In his 2016 book “Against Empathy,” the psychologist Paul Bloom argued that empathy can cloud rational judgment and skews toward people “who are close to us, those who are similar to us and those we see as more attractive or vulnerable and less scary.” The scholar and activist bell hooks put the matter more starkly. White desire to feel Black experience is predatory, exploitative, “eating the Other,” she wrote.

It’s impossible to perfectly inhabit another person’s experience. The important question is the value of the effort, and whether it leaves us separated by an asymptote or a chasm. Can a straight TV writer create an authentic gay sitcom character? If an author of European descent writes a novel from the perspective of Indigenous people, is it an empathic journey, or an imperialist incursion? “I don’t want to throw out what empathy is trying to do,” Alisha Gaines, a professor of African-American literature at Florida State University, told me. “I’m very critical of it though. Empathy has to be considered in the context of institutions and power.”

Ms. Gaines has devoted much of her scholarship to interrogating well-meaning white attempts at empathy for the Black experience, from the white journalist John Howard Griffin’s 1961 book “Black Like Me,” an account of his project to pass as a Black man on a trip through the Deep South, to a modern re-enactment of the Underground Railroad — whose organizers promised “empathy to the extreme,.” Ms. Gaines said: “If for 90 minutes I run around and look for the lantern in the window, what do I take from this into my everyday life? This is playing a slave, not an enslaved person. The humanity gets evacuated out of it.”

Yet, as a literature professor, she wants students to see books as passageways to experiences unlike their own. “I love books because I’m learning something about people I didn’t understand. I’m connecting,” Ms. Gaines told me. “I wasn’t reflected in books I read as a kid. I understood myself through ‘Anne of Green Gables’ and ‘Little Women’ — little Black kids often have to understand themselves through white protagonists.

At the same time, for me as a little girl reading ‘Anne of Green Gables,’ as much as I saw myself in her precociousness and her deep feeling, I also knew there wasn’t something speaking exactly to me. It was not a perfect mirror. We want to connect to the material on an emotional register and make space for the fact that each story tells a particular story.”

The impulse to participate in the feelings of another may be biological, rooted in our neurology. In the 19th-century German philosophers wrote of Einfühlung, or “in-feeling” — first translated in 1909 as the new English word “empathy.” They did not mean simulating someone else’s feelings, but projecting your own sentiments and memories in the course of an aesthetic or emotional experience, mingling your consciousness with the thing you are contemplating — whether it is a crying child, Picasso’s “Guernica” or a howling mountain landscape.

In the hands of the social scientists who rule our own time, empathy has become one piece of “emotional intelligence,” a term coined in the 1960s and developed by the psychologists Peter Salovey and John Mayer in 1990. The journalist Daniel Goleman popularized that phrase in his 1995 best seller “Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More than IQ,” which argued that focusing on emotional skills would reduce school violence and equip students for greater success in life. Research has shown that these capacities are at least as important for long-term happiness and economic security as “hard” skills like reading and math.

In 2004, Illinois became the first state to adopt standards from preschool through high school for social and emotional learning, or SEL. Since then, anti-bullying workshops, classroom rules stressing compassion and wall charts of “feeling words” and “emoji meters” have become more common in schools nationally. “The overwhelming majority of educators and parents acknowledge that teaching children SEL skills is critical,” Marc Brackett, director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, told me. “At the other end, in corporate America, employers are looking for people who have these skills.”

But the colorful classroom posters and the drive for data through “social-emotional competencies” student assessments — not necessarily bad things in themselves — risk reducing our idea of empathy to yet another job skill. The mania for standardized testing that followed the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act has further hampered teachers’ best and oldest tool for developing emotional understanding: the study of literature.

“I really do believe literature is an empathy tool, and reading literature widely can actually make you an empathetic person,” Sarah Levine, a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, told me. In many classrooms, the structure of standardized tests, especially multiple-choice questions and narrow essay rubrics, pushes teachers to drill students on finding arguments and literary devices rather than encouraging them to reflect on their own emotional response. “The standardized testing movement reduces literary reading to fact-finding,” Ms. Levine said.

She recently completed a study of a century of New York Regents exams and found that from the 2000s onward, “the reader disappeared from the questions that these tests are asking students. The reader is being asked to figure out what the central idea of the text is, as opposed to being asked to talk about how a text made them see something differently, or sympathize with someone,” she told me.

“We have to ask: Is this the kind of reading we want kids to do? It makes kids really dislike reading. That doesn’t mean we don’t read critically, but we should be using some of that critical and interpretive firepower on political speeches, political tweets, things that demand attention to the way people are using language because they have immediate impact on us as citizens of the world. We should use fiction for empathy, aesthetic pleasure, examining ethical dilemmas and just the experience of escaping.”

Ms. Levine taught high school English on the South Side of Chicago before Stanford. She said that despite the life of privilege she sees around her now, “the danger we’re exposing students to in English classrooms is just as bad for kids in Palo Alto as for kids in Chicago with many fewer resources. We’re teaching them that literature is not for them, because they aren’t a part of what they read. I don’t mean because they feel, ‘I don’t see Black and brown faces in my literature,’ but ‘I’m supposed to write an argument about a motif,’ and not do what kids do outside of the classroom: read and enjoy the experience.”

Emerson Holloway, an English major at Oberlin College in Ohio, read a lot on her own to make up for the fact that in high school, she didn’t always have “the opportunity to connect and empathize with characters,” she told me.

At Oberlin, she helps facilitate a student group called Barefoot Dialogues, which invites students to discuss a text or work of art over a home-cooked meal in order to “engage in trust and vulnerability to make connections across differences,” she said.

She acknowledged that in academia, empathy across identity lines has become controversial, and it’s crucial to “know your own boundaries,” she said. “You can ask, ‘What’s the point if we’re all so different? I’ll never be able to truly understand,’ and that’s true to an extent.”

Yet the effort to understand feels more important now than ever, she said. When Covid-19 hit in March, Barefoot Dialogues switched to Zoom meetings; its leaders are hoping for a hybrid of in-person and remote conversation this fall.

The college students I interviewed for this story stressed the role of empathy in firing up their curiosity, critical thinking and self-interrogation. “People often dismiss emotion as a weakness,” Andie Horowitz, a political science major at the University of Michigan, told me. “But a certain level of emotion makes you interested in something, wanting to find the truth.”

She explained how her professor in a course on gender and the law led students in a deep dive into the lives of the individuals in cases they studied. “When you understand the people behind the movement, it becomes so much more personal,” she said. “That’s where empathy comes into critical thinking and being motivated to learn more.”

This fall, the sight of students of all ages squirming in front of iPads — struggling to learn about themselves and each other through apps and spotty Wi-Fi — drives home the urgency of social and emotional learning. But empathetic education was under attack long before Covid-19 hit. The desiccation of great books in the hands of testing bureaucrats and the politicization of literature in university classrooms is not a neatly left-wing or right-wing assault. It is a collective failure of confidence in our teachers and students. “When we think our students can’t do something, we’re done. Pack it up,” Ms. Gaines, the professor at Florida State, told me. “Given the opportunity, and the space to be vulnerable and space to say they don’t understand and don’t know, lots of growth can happen.”

This is the gift of liberal education: the invitation to read a book and think about both the variety and the common threads of human experience across time, space and culture. “Empathy extends beyond trying to put yourself in other people’s shoes,” said Ms. Holloway, the student at Oberlin. “Success is not part of that definition, really. The act of listening is a form of that empathy. You’re willing to attempt to understand.” Only by constantly making that attempt — however imperfect — can we learn empathy’s hazards, and its power.

Molly Worthen is the author, most recently, of “Charismatic Leaders Who Remade America,” an associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and a contributing opinion writer.

#Empathy

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jeroldlockettus · 6 years

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In Praise of Incrementalism (Rebroadcast)

The British cycling outfit Team Sky used a strategy of “marginal gains” to win four Tours de France since their founding. (Photo: Jaguar MENA/flckr)

Our latest Freakonomics Radio episode is called “In Praise of Incrementalism (Rebroadcast).” (You can subscribe to the podcast at Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or elsewhere, get the RSS feed, or listen via the media player above.)

What do Renaissance painting, civil-rights movements, and Olympic cycling have in common? In each case, huge breakthroughs came from taking tiny steps. In a world where everyone is looking for the next moonshot, we shouldn’t ignore the power of incrementalism.

Below is a transcript of the episode, modified for your reading pleasure. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post. And you’ll find credits for the music in the episode noted within the transcript.

* * *

Our previous episode of Freakonomics Radio was called “In Praise of Maintenance (Rebroadcast).” We asked if our cultural obsession with innovation has led us to neglect the fact that things also need to be taken care of. We talked about sewers:

Ed GLAESER: Certainly, Rome understood that engineering and infrastructure was a huge part of making its city function.

About bridges:

Larry SUMMERS: It’s a remarkable and not a very happy tale.

We talked about housework:

Ruth SCHWARTZ COWAN: They’re doing almost as much unpaid maintenance work as they are paid work.

And we talked about the nuts and bolts of the digital economy:

Martin CASADO: I mean, all of that is infrastructure.

We wound up talking about a pet project of mine — which is trying to digitally archive all my work and personal files:

Chris LACINACK: So this is about maintenance. It’s losing the 200 pounds and then staying that weight.

This project was daunting — until someone helped me frame it differently:

LACINAK: It’s all about prioritization, one step at a time.

One step at a time. Increment by increment. It got me to thinking about the value of incrementalism in a moonshot world. It got me to thinking that incrementalism is to the moonshot, what maintenance is to innovation. And so, this week on Freakonomics Radio: “In Praise of Incrementalism.” Or, if that’s too wonky for you, how about this: What do the Italian Renaissance, the Tour de France, and the civil-rights movement have in common?

Linda HIRSHMAN: We all like a dramatic story. But things don’t happen out of the blue, and it’s so interesting to get a true picture of why change happens, rather than this sort of phony all of a sudden picture.

* * *

Ed Glaeser is an economics professor at Harvard. I wanted to ask him about my “incrementalism” idea.

DUBNER: So my argument here is that generally we are encouraged and trained, really, to look for big-bang successes, in all realms — education, health care, politics, you name it — and while I understand the impulse to find these magic bullets — it’s exciting, it’s sexy, it’s all those things — it strikes me that much progress if not most throughout history has really been a series of incremental gains. What’s your take on that?

GLAESER: Oh, I think almost surely that’s true. I like these examples from the arts you can really see each innovation in each painting and each step along the way. If you think about the glory of the Italian Renaissance, it’s a piecemeal process. Brunelleschi first puts together the mathematics of linear perspective, of making two-dimensional spaces seem three-dimensional — Donatello, his friend, puts it in low-relief sculpture. It moves to Masaccio, who finally puts it into a painting in Brancacci Chapel, St. Peter finding the coin in the belly of a fish. Fra’ Filippo Lippi takes up the ball. Botticelli takes up the ball, each person incrementally improving on the last person. Each person exploring the implications of this new idea. It’s not that Da Vinci comes along and then all of a sudden the world is different. It’s that he’s built on a century of incrementalists, some of whom are pretty big incrementalists but incrementalists nonetheless, who are really creating this revolution.

Glaeser is plainly an erudite fellow, especially for an economist. But just so you don’t think he spends all his time thinking about Renaissance art and ignoring his own discipline – well, we talked about that too.

GLAESER: Within the field of economics, there are larger or smaller parts of those increments, but we’re a field that builds on itself, and it’s sort of a striking fact that within economics, that the Nobel Prize doesn’t really give awards for single papers, so much as it does for a series of contributions by a particular person. And that’s surely as it should be, because there’s rarely true that one paper on itself is so revolutionary that it changes things. It’s more that people build on things. It often takes dozens of extra ones to figure out what it means, and what it what it implies for the wider world.

DUBNER: So plainly you appreciate incrementalism in your own field, and in other fields. Do you feel that puts you a little bit in the minority? Do you feel that our culture and political and social culture is always looking for some version of the moon shot?

GLAESER: I don’t know. I mean, I think this is more a Silicon Valley thing than a Cambridge thing. I think maybe I believe in incrementalism because I’m so painfully aware of the very incremental nature of my own contributions. But it’s certainly true that in the political sphere we are always looking for big bang solutions. We’re looking for a leader who will make everything right by coming around the corner, and inevitably we’re incredibly disappointed that somehow or other this new leader didn’t magically change everything. The more that you just think that the right answer is just to elect one person who will magically fix anything, the less that you actually pay attention to what really matters, which is the nit and grit of everyday decision-making, of everyday governance.

DUBNER: So civil-rights reform strikes me as one where incrementally, there have been massive improvements, and yet it seems as though the appetite for an overnight solution to every civil-rights issue is expected. And when that doesn’t happen, there’s massive hue and cry — even though, overall, the trend has been moving in the right direction. You see that as well, or do you think I’m wrong on that?

GLAESER: No, no I agree totally with that. And it required people who — the NAACP for example, which worked for decades before the Civil Rights Act to move the ball forward. Often in ways that were important, but seem today quite modest. I mean fighting up to the Supreme Court. Fighting the attempts to zone by race, for example, which it did in the teens. Right? You know, American segregation would’ve been even worse if cities could explicitly zoned by race, but they couldn’t. Fighting restrictive covenants as it did in the 40’s. Fighting segregation in American schools as it did in the 50’s. Decade by decade, increment by increment. And once we start thinking that there’s a silver bullet, we lose that, we lose the fact that we need to be working day by day, over decades, to affect change.

MUSIC: Lucy Bland, “Backseat” (from The Ruiner)

So let’s take a look at a recent story that’s been decades in the making.

JUSTICE KENNEDY: The Court now holds that same-sex couples may exercise the fundamental right to marry in all states; no longer may this liberty be denied to them.

In 2015, the Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marriage. “Marriage,” wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy in the majority opinion, “is a keystone of the Nation’s social order … There is no difference between same- and opposite-sex couples with respect to this principle.”

JUSTICE KENNEDY:The challenged laws excluding same-sex couples from marriage cannot stand under the Constitution.

In 2001, the Pew Research Center found that a majority of Americans opposed same-sex marriage. The margin was 57 percent against to 35 percent in favor. But by 2015, those numbers had practically flipped. Which would seem to indicate a rather sudden shift.

Linda HIRSHMAN: People often say to me, “Wow, gay marriage. It succeeded so quickly!” They say that all the time. We all like a dramatic story. But things don’t happen out of the blue, and it’s so interesting to get a true picture of why change happens, rather than this sort of phony, all-of-a-sudden picture.

That’s Linda Hirshman. She’s a legal scholar who used to practice labor law – she argued two cases before the Supreme Court and briefed and managed a third. She’s also the author of several books, including Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution. The revolution, Hirshman argues, was incremental.

HIRSHMAN: It wasn’t the explosion that the popular narrative makes it out to be.

So, to understand how we got here:

PAMELA BROWN: A historic day here at the Supreme Court, Jay. You can probably hear gay-rights advocates to my right cheering this decision.

You have to go back to a time when life for gay men and women in America was very different.

JOSEPH McCARTHY: There’s another group about which I hesitate to talk, but I think the picture isn’t complete unless we do.

HIRSHMAN: It got very bad during the Joseph McCarthy period.

JOSEPH McCARTHY: This unusual State Department affliction, homosexuals…

HIRSHMAN: The sort of Red Scare stuff that went on in America started in World War II. And right after WWII, it really ramped up, and the government used the fact that people were gay as evidence that they were subversive. And they fired them if they worked for the government, so it was a very dark period in gay history.

One of those people was Frank Kameny. He was a Ph.D. astronomer from Harvard.

HIRSHMAN: He was hoping to become an astronaut.

Kameny worked with the Army Map Service of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

HIRSHMAN: And they caught him in a bathroom in San Francisco and they fired him.

This was in 1957.

HIRSHMAN: And he said, “That’s unconstitutional. You can’t fire me just because I’m gay.” And he sued the United States.

Kameny lost, and appealed. He lost again on appeal. In 1961, Kameny petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court, but was turned down.

HIRSHMAN: It was too soon. But things in America were starting to break up. And just at that moment, Frank Kameny had the courage to resist.

The civil-rights movement was growing – sit-ins, Freedom Rides, eventually the March on Washington, D.C., in 1963. Frank Kameny wanted to do something similar for gays and lesbians. There was a gay-rights group, founded in Los Angeles in 1950, called the Mattachine Society. The name came from mattachino – Italian for a court jester who spoke truth to power. Kameny started a Washington chapter of the Mattachine Society, and he organized protests outside the White House and other federal buildings.

FRANK KAMENY: Every American citizen has the right to be considered by his government on the basis of his own personal merit, as an individual.

That’s Kameny speaking outside the State Department in 1965. At the time, the State Department argued that gay men and women were national-security risks because they could be easily blackmailed.

KAMENY: Certainly some homosexuals are poor risks. This is no excuse for penalizing all homosexuals.

Their protests were ineffective. Here’s then-Secretary of State Dean Rusk.

Dean RUSK: Well, I understand that we’re being picketed by a group of homosexuals. [Laughter] The policy of the department is that we do not employ homosexuals knowingly. And if we discover homosexuals in our department, we discharge them.

From the tone of Rusk’s voice, you get a sense of just how much stigma was attached to homosexuality. You have to remember – being gay at the time could not only get you fired; it could also land you in jail. Nearly every state at the time had sodomy laws. Was there at least some support from the medical community? Hardly:

Charles SOCARIDES: Homosexuality is in fact a mental illness, which has reached epidemiological proportions.

That’s Charles Socarides, a psychiatry professor, interviewed for a 1967 CBS News report called “The Homosexual.”

SOCARIDES: The fact that somebody’s homosexual — a true, obligatory homosexual — automatically rules out the possibility that he will remain happy for long in my opinion.

HIRSHMAN: Kameny had figured out as soon as he got active that there could be no equality for gay and lesbian people while they were classified as crazy.

Indeed, Socarides’s view was hardly a marginal one. The American Psychiatric Association classified homosexuality as a mental disorder. The Mattachine Society and other groups set out to change that classification.

HIRSHMAN: And they went about it in a very incrementalist way. They went to the people in the American Psychiatric Association who were studying the question of the diagnoses. They’re a medical association, so they had scholars who were studying it. So the gay organizers approached the scholars and said, “You’re wrong. You’ve got to do real research into this.”

It helped, perhaps, that Frank Kameny was himself a scientist. Hirshman says he could spot flaws in the scholarship about homosexuality. For instance, most of the studies relied solely on gay psychiatric patients.

HIRSHMAN: I mean once somebody is going to the psychiatrist to be helped, he’s part of a population that’s not representative of the whole gay population, right? He’s already in need of psychiatric help or he wouldn’t be there in the first place. You have to look at a representative sample of the whole population and see if they seem to be in distress, which they did not, except from the persecution of course. And to see if they were functioning according to the other indices of good mental health. And they were. The numbers were overwhelming, once the psychiatrists stopped looking at their own patients.

Homosexuality was finally removed from the list of mental illnesses in 1973.

HIRSHMAN: To their credit, these doctors, at the end of the day confronted with the science, did change their position. I interviewed, before he died, the psychiatrist who was in charge of the A.P.A. at the time and he said it was the greatest accomplishment of his life.

So that was progress. But consensual sex between two people of the same gender was still illegal in most states, and those laws gave the police enormous power over gays and lesbians.

MARTIN BOYCE: They were always on the lookout for us. They tormented us. They just didn’t leave us alone.

That’s Martin Boyce, a longtime New Yorker who participated in the famous Stonewall riots in 1969.

BOYCE: The amount of people that had trouble with the police or were sent to some sort of institution or were brutalized one way or another, with the police not intervening or being on the side of the brutalizer, was growing. I don’t think any of us did not know someone who really, really suffered real consequences. If not ourselves, then somebody.

The riots were set off by a police raid of the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village. In retrospect, the riots were a turning point in the gay-rights movement. But it would take a long time to gather enough momentum to challenge the legal system.

HIRSHMAN: Quietly during those years in various states and around the country, state courts and state legislators had been decriminalizing sodomy. So gays were now not crazy, and they then attacked the premise that their behavior was criminal. And they were succeeding pretty well.

But many states still had sodomy laws. The movement’s ultimate goal was to take the fight all the way to the Supreme Court, which could invalidate all the state laws at once. In 1986, at the height of the AIDS epidemic, the American Civil Liberties Union thought it found a perfect test case in Michael Hardwick, a gay man who’d been arrested for sodomy in Georgia.

HIRSHMAN: In the gay legal bureaucracy, it was felt they reasonably could expect now to get a national judgment that criminalizing gay sex, as opposed to not gay sex, which is not criminal, was a violation of the equal-protection clause.

The ACLU did take the case, known as Bowers v. Hardwick, to the Supreme Court. And …

HIRSHMAN: They lost it, 5-4.

The majority ruled that the right to engage in sodomy was not constitutionally protected. Linda Hirshman says it was a devastating defeat for the gay community.

HIRSHMAN: The opinion is reprehensible and they were already suffering from AIDS.

But, she says, it also made gay-rights advocates even more determined.

HIRSHMAN: Sometimes a defeat like that is so insulting that it radicalizes the community.

By now, the right to marry was becoming another significant plank in the gay-rights platform. Here, from back in 1974, is Frank Kameny talking about it on PBS:

KAMENY: Exercise by homosexual couples of the right to marry detracts not one iota from the rights of heterosexual couples to marry. Homosexual marriages interfere with no one individually. And such marriages impair or interfere with no societal interests.

The question was how the goal of gay marriage could be achieved through the courts. Hirshman says that one source of inspiration was found in the African-American leadership, particularly the NAACP, that pursued civil-rights legislation in the 1950s and 60s.

HIRSHMAN: They followed an incremental pattern more cleanly than any other social movement because the NAACP controlled it.

Thurgood Marshall, who eventually became the first black Supreme Court Justice, was head of the NAACP’s legal strategy. In that capacity, he argued several cases before the Supreme Court, including the landmark Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, which in 1954 desegregated public schools.

HIRSHMAN: The closest that we’ve come in American social history to having a dictator is Thurgood Marshall. The Inc. fund, the NAACP legal-defense fund, controlled the money that you needed to spend to prove a school desegregation case. And accordingly, they got to say in what order that very fundamental question of school desegregation was presented to the Supreme Court. So they challenged, for instance, a law school that segregated its one black law student out from the class of white law students by roping him off. I mean they didn’t tie him up, but so important was the maintenance of racial caste. And it’s hard for a Supreme Court in the 50’s to look at that and say, “Oh, that’s okay.” So in fact the court said it was unconstitutional. Okay now, if it’s unconstitutional to segregate a state law school, why isn’t it unconstitutional to segregate state colleges? And from there to the grade schools, which was the socially the most explosive decision.

The gay-rights movement had no dictator, like Thurgood Marshall. Nor was there a single, dominant organization like the NAACP. But, Linda Hirshman says, there was a consensus beginning to form among activists that the gay-marriage fight would be the hardest one to win. Which meant continuing to focus on the sodomy laws – and fighting anti-gay discrimination in the labor and housing markets and elsewhere.

HIRSHMAN: They very smartly went back to the drawing board with the sodomy laws. And kept getting them struck down by state courts and reformed and reversed in state legislatures until it was an outlier in America to make sodomy criminal.

Finally, in a 2003 case called Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court overturned Bowers v. Hardwick, thus invalidating all remaining sodomy laws.

BOYCE: And that I think was the most important decision of them all.

That again is Martin Boyce, veteran of the Stonewall riots.

BOYCE: I mean once that happened, then it was going to be a matter of time. I don’t know how much time. It could have been many more years of incrementalism. But I knew it was going to happen.

“It” being the legal right for same-sex marriage. Gay-rights advocates won the legal battle in a number of states – Massachusetts was first, in 2004 – although they subsequently had to fight off a proposed federal amendment to the Constitution that would have defined marriage as a union between a man and a woman. They kept working to shift public opinion. In 2012, President Obama, who had previously opposed same-sex marriage, changed his position:

Barack OBAMA: At a certain point I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.

The same-sex marriage movement, as triumphant as it was, in some ways came out of order. There were other, perhaps more fundamental goals to still accomplish — for instance, winning nondiscrimination protections for the LGBTQ community throughout the U.S. Still, as Linda Hirshman points out, the marriage movement did work, and it worked because of the incremental steps that added up to victory. Hirshman has written a number of books on social movements. We asked if she had any advice for one social movement: Black Lives Matter.

HIRSHMAN: I have lessons that I think any future movement can learn from the gay-rights movement, and they are as follows: Put your own interest first. Do not take up every conceivable progressive issue that somebody in your movement thinks is interesting. At the beginning, new movements don’t have a lot of spare capital and they need to spend it on their issues and the things that will keep them together rather than fragment them. The gay movement did that. Two, take the moral high ground. The AIDS epidemic forced the gay movement to take the moral high ground, and they did it beautifully and then they used it in the marriage fight perfectly. And the third lesson is have weekly meetings. I am not convinced that social media is a substitute for the kind of social, deep rich social contacts that emerge from physical proximity to one another. The next steps that Black Lives Matter can take are reasonable ones for them to take next, okay? The availability of technology in the form of video cameras and phone cameras empowers them to take bolder action than they would be able to take without the technology. So their next steps look about right to me. They’re bold, but they are in a sense incremental. I mean saying, “Don’t shoot me while I’ve got my hands in the air” does not strike me as a radical position. They then have to move to much more profound issues like the organization of the police force and their training and the way that people use local taxes against communities of color like in Ferguson. Those are bigger bites, but it’s time I think for those to be addressed as well.

MUSIC: Andrea Wittgens and Sugartown, “Alibi Was Just An Afterthought” (from Alibi)

* * *

MUSIC: Nicholas Pesci, “Feeling Quirky”

Let me ask you a question: where do you get your financial advice?

Jim CRAMER: Let me tell you how I see it.

Maybe you tune in Jim Cramer to see where the market’s headed?

CRAMER: Crystal-clear short-term signal [Sell! Sell! Sell!] to sell the automakers for the moment.

Or maybe you follow a different money guru.

CLIP: Squawk Box! Weekdays at 6am on CNBC!

Mike SANTOLI: We know why these stocks look cheap.

PRESENTER: Dan, walk over to the smart board.

David LAIBSON: It depresses me that so many people giving so much bad advice have such a big audience and get paid for it.

That’s David Laibson.

LAIBSON: I’m a behavioral economist at Harvard University.

Laibson’s done a lot of amazing research over the years – really amazing, you should look it up – mainly focused on how people make decisions. And how a lot of those decisions are suboptimal – and what should be done about that. Consider saving for retirement. A lot of people don’t follow the incremental approach.

LAIBSON: They love to hear the get-rich-quick story, and people dispensing those stories get big audiences. And some of them even have good historical track records and they get even bigger audiences, until of course they get a bad track record. It’s very easy to get sucked into a false prophet, and there’s so many of them in the financial-services industry.

In study after study, the data overwhelmingly show that individual investors are no good at picking stocks.

LAIBSON: Even the pros are no good at that game. The ability of a mutual fund that does well in one year to do well in the next year is close to perfect chance. So you’re just making a mistake. It’s a very natural mistake. I understand the mistake, because we all look out at the world and say, “Hey, I can see good companies and bad companies.” The problem is that that goodness and badness is already priced in. So you’re not the first one to figure out that Amazon’s a good company. You’re not the first one to notice that this car maker is starting to make bad products and no one is buying their vehicles. Everyone is seeing what you’re seeing. All that information is priced in already. You don’t have an advantage in playing the market.

So what’s a better way to think about saving for retirement?

LAIBSON: One has the impression that it’s impossible to save enough for retirement — and to a certain extent, it is impossible if you start at age 50. But if you start early in life, and every year, you contribute let’s say 10 percent of your income, and maybe there’s an employer match, so now we’re up to maybe 15 percent, and you invest that savings in a diversified mutual fund, stocks and bonds, and you have low fees, and you keep going at that year in and year out, and you don’t decumulate prematurely — it’s amazing how that process produces millions of dollars of retirement savings. So it’s kind of hard to imagine how you go from what seems like a little bit of money each year to being a millionaire but that’s exactly the way it works when you work out the math.

DUBNER: So what you’re describing is not at all a secret to anyone who’s ever read any basic personal-finance or investing book. And yet, as we know, there are a lot of people who don’t follow that. Talk to me for a minute about what we know about the people who have the ability and the resources, the income to accomplish exactly that plan but don’t do it. Is it just too boring, is it too much work, is spending here and now just too exciting to divert that saving today?

LAIBSON: It’s a lot of elements. One element is investing is complicated. So one of the ways that success is achieved is by employers auto-enrolling their employees in these plans and then auto-escalating their savings rates. Also the employer picks a good default investment fund, again diversified, stocks and bonds, mostly stocks when young, moving more and more to bonds as you age. Low fees. Passive investments, so rather than having active management, which is costly, you have passive investments that implies lower fees. And when the employer puts all those pieces in place, people go with the flow. They don’t opt out. They don’t say no. In fact, they say, “Thank you so much. I’m so glad you did this for me.” But if all those pieces aren’t there, we go off the rails. So our employer may not offer such a plan. That’s a problem for approximately half of the private-sector workforce. There are so many ways in which, unless the right conditions are there, we end up doing what comes natural, which is postponing saving or, even if we save, decumulating. That’s another big risk factor. Maybe I’m at a firm for 10 years; I’ve now accumulated a considerable pool of funds. I leave that firm to go to another firm. Rather than rolling the money over to an IRA or leaving the money in the original employer’s plan, I take that savings as a distribution and now I’m spending that money. So in fact, rather than building the beginning of the snowball that’s going to roll into something enormous, I’ve made my savings vanish and I start again from zero at the next firm. So there’s a lot of ways in which, even though we know we should save for retirement, we fail unless the right conditions exist for us to succeed. It’s those workers who accept those defaults and who take advantage of these modern retirement savings systems, employer-based retirement savings systems, who end up thriving in retirement.

One more conversation today, before we wrap things up, on incrementalism.

DUBNER: Shall I call you Sir Brailsford, Sir Dave, how does that work?

Dave BRAILSFORD: No, no. It was a nice thing to happen at the time but in reality gets you an upgrade on flights and a few hotels rooms but that’s about it really. So let’s stick to “Dave.”

Dave Brailsford was knighted for helping turn Great Britain into a perennial titan in the sport of cycling.

BRAILSFORD: Prior to the year 2000, Great Britain was a nation that only won one gold medal in 76 years of trying.

In Rio, in 2016? Team GB won 12 cycling medals, including 6 gold. At the 2012 Games, in London? Eight gold medals. Brailsford was the performance director of the British Cycling team from 2003 until 2014. In 2009, he helped found the professional cycling outfit Team Sky. The stated goal of Team Sky at the time was to have a British winner of the Tour de France within five years. In fact, Team Sky won two Tours within its first five years, and then two more in 2015 and 2016. Brailsford grew up in Wales, the son of a mountain climber. He wanted to be a professional cyclist, maybe even win the Tour de France himself.

BRAILSFORD: So I decided to pack my bags, rucksack, bike in a box and saved all my money, took enough and went to France.

He found a team willing to take him on – perhaps out of pity, he says now.

BRAILSFORD: I realized pretty early on that I wasn’t going to make it as a top-level professional cyclist. So I thought, Well if I can’t win the Tour de France myself then maybe the future lies in helping other people do that.

So Brailsford returned to the U.K. and went to university. He studied sport science and psychology, then got an M.B.A. He first started working for British Cycling back in 1997. Over the years, he developed a strategy based on a principle called “marginal gains.”

BRAILSFORD: Physics and cycling go hand in hand. It’s a sport that lends itself nicely to physics, data collection, measurement, power and speed. And so, we could collect lots of data and analyze performance and we could feed that back to riders. And then we could work with them on small, very small, minor tweaks, minor changes that probably felt relatively insignificant at the time, but over time, would stick.

DUBNER: Give me a for-instance. Is it something like posture, it is something like pacing, is it mental?

BRAILSFORD: Yeah, positional. You know, across the whole continuum of sport, of the performance. Some of it could be the position of the bike, the position of the head. We fight against the wind in cycling all the time. It’s the biggest thing that slows us down. And just literally dropping the head between the shoulders, dropping it down just a centimeter will improve the aerodynamics and for the same power, you’ll go a little bit further. And the more you can think about holding that position and being cognizant of that position whilst you’re riding at your limit, it makes a difference.

But the marginal-gains approach went well beyond aerodynamics. The idea was to produce at least a one-percent improvement in every facet of the enterprise. From the mechanical – like installing a tire perfectly straight on the rim. To the physiological – like managing the riders’ nutrition and choosing the best massage gel.

BRAILSFORD: We’d look at hand-washing, for example, an area where we’d go to the Olympic Games and we’d be in great form and then we’d be terrified of the riders getting ill or catching a bug. So we started to think about, Wow, how are you going to optimize or reduce the chances of us getting an illness within the team in the Olympic Village for example, and then for that to run through the team and create havoc. So we got a surgeon in who showed everybody how to wash their hands properly. We had people who cleaned all the handles, cleaned the lifts buttons, we obviously encouraged people not to shake hands and be very mindful of this and use hand gels all the time. And I mean, it’s common practice now but when we were starting out, there were small little things that, we’d think, Is that going win us a medal? Well, no, it’s not. But is it going to contribute to it? Yeah, potentially.

DUBNER: How did you first come to embrace the notion that marginal gains could be fruitful? How did you go about learning or deciding which areas to apply it to?

BRAILSFORD: It wasn’t something overnight, like I just woke up morning and thought, “Okay, well, we’ll do it like this. We’re human beings.” And when someone says, I’d like a perfect performance, that is daunting. So I thought, let’s break our performance to all of its component parts, map them all out, and then let’s have a look and see is it is possible to progress in each one of the areas? And can we be bothered to do it? Because it takes a lot of work and energy. And then you’ve got something that people are in control of and they feel empowered to move forward. So, yeah, they’ll say, “I might not be able to see how I’m going to get to top of that massive mountain over there, but boy I tell you what, I can improve a small amount in my nutrition, in my diet, I can move my weight program forward, I can get another five minutes sleep a night, I can do all the recovery protocols as necessary.” You know, and on and on it goes. Now, there’s a big psychological component of this where there’s a team and support team — if everyone buys into that philosophy, you’re creating a culture which is actually moving forward and is actually kind of building a little bit of momentum. Now there’s no denying, there’s no point to doing anything in the periphery unless the absolute critical elements, which are going to account for 40 or 50 percent of the performance, are in place.

DUBNER: What are you talking about when you talk about that 40 or 50 percent baseline? Is that talent, is that riders who are very, very good already?

BRAILSFORD: So, you have to have a hunger and a willingness. And it’s not so much a hunger of wanting to be an Olympic champion. It’s a hunger towards, “I can break down what it would take to get from where I am now to be an Olympic champion and I can see the sacrifices, I can see the suffering, and doing all of that work.” So, that’s for me what we mark down as a “hunger index.” We then look at the talent obviously, and then you have barriers. So, remove the barriers and that will then equal success.

DUBNER: I’m guessing back when you were trying to break into cycling yourself, there was probably no such thing as a “hunger index” there. I’m guessing, if there had been — what do you think your hunger index was back then, Dave?

BRAILSFORD: Very high. I’m a trier, there’s no doubt about that. I think that’s something that’s just set I guess, maybe part of my psychology, my personality.

DUBNER: Well, being the son of a mountain climber probably doesn’t hurt, huh?

BRAILSFORD: No, that’s right, that’s right. You know the one thing he always used to tell me was, “You’ve got to be professional,” always “you’ve got to be professional, professional, professional.” And I used to roll my eyes every time he said it, like, “Come on Dad, shut up.” And then somewhere down the line, it seems to have stuck.

MUSIC: Paul Avgerinos, “Playful Light Delight”

Team Sky, the professional cycling team that Brailsford now runs, competes in big-time races like the Tour de France, where you cover more than 2,000 miles over three weeks. Which means a new day, a new hotel, and a new bed. And, again, Brailsford saw an opportunity for a marginal gain.

BRAILSFORD: The hotel is given to you by the organization, you can’t change it, you don’t know what the mattress is going to be like, you don’t know what the room is going to be like. So we have a forward team that go into the hotels and they have a room protocol. Basically, they lift the bed up, they Hoover under the bed, they clean the room, they have antibacterial protocol which cleans all the room including the television, remote control, the tap handles, etc. We take the shower head off and clean the shower. And then they have their own mattresses, their own pillows specifically for each rider. And so they can sleep in the same posture every night. Now is that going to win you the Tour de France? Probably not, but it can contribute.

DUBNER: Let me ask you: your teams have been phenomenally successful. To what extent do you believe that the marginal gains approach is actually responsible? I get the sense from previous interviews that you think that maybe too much has been made of the marginal-gains business.

BRAILSFORD: I think it gave us a methodology, it gave us an approach which allowed the support staff and the riders, to be of a certain mindset and approach things in a certain way. And there’s no doubt about it, it was like a contagious enthusiasm, if you’d like. I think equally, at times, it’s too simplistic, just to say, “Well, all we have to do is adopt this marginal-gains approach,” and I think people misunderstood the concept of marginal gains being the latest bit of technology or improvement to the bike or aerodynamics, etc. I think what they missed was the whole tacit psychological component, which created a culture and a mindset within a group which allowed the whole group to buy in to something, to have a collective approach where hundredths of a second could be the difference between winning and losing.

DUBNER: Now, of course even casual cycling fans, they know that Lance Armstrong, who won the Tour de France seven times, vehemently denied doping for many years until he eventually admitted it; and that many, many cyclists have doped, which really put a huge stain on the sport. So how does a group of cyclist as dominant as yours, with both Team Sky and Team GB, expect all of us to believe that there’s no doping going on?

BRAILSFORD: It’s a very good question. And I don’t think given the past that we can expect everybody to just believe everything that they see. And I think they’re right to question. There were questions asked in the past, and people trusted Lance and it came as a big blow and big shock to a lot of people. And I think that would inevitably lead to a level of suspicion and a lack of trust that was going to be a hangover from that period. So I fully understand why people do question us. And I think our job then is to try and be as transparent and open as possible about what we do and how we do it. And also over time, I think people will see that we are doing it the right way. We are doing it clean and like I say, we just have to be accepting of the situation we find ourselves in and be patient and tolerant and transparent.

Not long after this interview with Brailsford, he and Team Sky found themselves in a situation. Computer hackers released Team Sky documents showing that its two star riders of the past several years – Chris Froome and Bradley Wiggins, both of whom have won the Tour de France — that they used banned substances under what’s known as a therapeutic use exemption, or a T.U.E. A T.U.E. allows a rider to use an otherwise off-limits drug for legitimate medical reasons. In Wiggins’s case, for instance, in order to treat his pollen allergies before the Tour in 2011 and 2012, he injected a banned corticosteroid called triamcinolone, which some say acts as a performance enhancer.

There’s no evidence that Wiggins or anyone else on Team Sky broke the rules – it was, after all, a therapeutic use exemption. Which is supposed to be kept confidential. But when it wasn’t kept confidential, and when you run a team that’s been hugely successful, and when you’ve been touting something called “marginal gains” as a key component of that success – well, people will talk, especially in Britain, where cycling is a national obsession.

Here’s the Sunday Times sportswriter David Walsh talking to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation:

David WALSH: The problem that Team Sky have got with this is not only the act itself, which is at the very least highly questionable, but they’re the team that set themselves up as whiter than white. They’re the team that set themselves up as totally transparent. They have been anything but transparent in their response to this. They have basically refused to go into any detail about how this was authorized and they’re basically sticking to the line: it was approved by the authorities and therefore it was technically legal. And for lots of people that’s not good enough, because ethics still matter in sport. Morals still matter.

MUSIC: Judson Lee Music, “Stars Falling”

In a report earlier this year, the U.K.’s government committee on sport came down hard on Brailsford and Team Sky. “How can David Brailsford,” the report read, “ensure that his team is performing to his requirements if he does not know and cannot tell what drugs the doctors are giving the riders? Brailsford must take responsibility for these failures, the regime under which Team Sky riders trained and competed, and the damaging skepticism about the legitimacy of his team’s performance and accomplishments.” Team Sky and Braillsford continue to refute any claims that they knowingly broke any anti-doping regulations.

It’s impossible to say, at this moment, the degree to which Team Sky may have broken or stretched the rules — or the extent to which their success will be downgraded if they are found to have broken the rules. Just as progress in civil rights and investing and cycling itself is an incremental exercise, so too is the revelation of truth. What I do think we can agree on is this: if you want to accomplish something, especially something large and meaningful, it pays to at least think hard about an incremental approach.

Let’s say you weigh 30 pounds more than you should. And you decide to lose it. What’s your expectation – that you can lose it all in just a few weeks, even just a few months? That’s ridiculous. Do you know how long it took you to put on those 30 pounds? A long time! It’s a lot of work to put on 30 extra pounds – well, not work, it’s actually quite fun, eating all that delicious food. But still, it took a lot of nachos and rice bowls and sugary drinks to put on 30 extra pounds. Go to the supermarket and look at a five-pound bag of potatoes. Now look at six of them – that’s how much you’ve accumulated, over time. So you know what? It’s going to take some time to decumulate. Little by little. Choice by choice. Increment by increment. If you expect otherwise – well, your expectations are likely to be dashed. By lowering your expectations, you can actually raise your chances of success.

So … good luck — whether your goal is losing weight or saving money or contributing to a social movement. As always, we’d love to hear from you. Let us know how it’s going. We’re at [email protected].

Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC Studios and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Christopher Werth. Our staff also includes Alison Hockenberry, Merritt Jacob, Stephanie Tam, Greg Rosalsky, Max Miller, Harry Huggins, and Andy Meisenheimer; we had help this week from Louis Mitchell. The music you hear throughout the episode was composed by Luis Guerra. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

* * *

Here’s where you can learn more about the people and ideas in this episode:

SOURCES

Ed Glaeser, professor of economics, Harvard.

Chris Lacinak, founder and president, AVPreserve.

Linda Hirshman, legal scholar and author.

David Laibson, professor of economics, Harvard.

Dave Brailsford, cycling performance director (Team Sky and Team Great Britain).

RESOURCES

Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier, by Ed Glaeser.

“Changing Attitudes on Gay Marriage,” by the Pew Research Center.

“Frank Kameny — Astronomer, Activist, and Organizer.”

Additional music scoring by Jay Cowit

The post In Praise of Incrementalism (Rebroadcast) appeared first on Freakonomics.

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