Dr. Seuss and Philosophy
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But what does it mean to be “functional” anyway? Do they just want you to behave within standard parameters so you can hold down your humdrum workaday job and life, or perhaps perform well at the standardized mind-numbing tasks that occupy the majority of the school day? Should this be the standard we live our lives by? There are so many questions and too many people ready to give us answers. Maybe it’s time we ask some questions: Who put you in charge? Why is your way the best?
Or consider sexuality. Now obviously Seuss didn’t deal with this issue in any of his books. I can only imagine the puns, word play, and menagerie that would attend a Seussian dialogue on sex and gender. But maybe that is how we ought to think about this topic. One thing Foucault is adamant to point out is that the very idea of gender and sex is a result of medicalizing human behavior. We diagnose you as straight or gay or bi. We demand that you categorize yourself, so we can prescribe the appropriate behaviors or condemnations. We figure out how you ought to behave, what is healthy, normal, and well adjusted. But gender is a construct. The idea that girls do one thing and boys another is so preposterous that its prevalence can only be explained as a mechanism of control reinforced and maintained because we refuse to stand up against it. As one scholar noted, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society; it is civilization as a whole that creates this creature.”7 It’s not the case that all women are or need to be any particular way. The same goes for the rest of us. The world is populated by individuals. The group or categories we lump them into are often artificial creations that can and ought to be fought against. People are too different, too diverse to be categorized so simply as this or that gender. Such a simple construction is the result of simple minds, not evidence of a simple, ordered universe. So maybe a Seussian sex menagerie, as odd as it would be, would be enlightening and more a mirror of reality: ambiguously gendered creatures that float between and within categories, each its own unique being navigating a maze of roles and positions in order to merely be the kind of thing that it is, regardless of whether it can be easily compartmentalized. Girls who like girls, and boys who like boys, or girls who like boys who like girls who like toys.
An additional point Foucault makes with respect to sexuality is how our discourse on it controls it. We don’t control sex by not talking about it. Rather, we control sex and behavior by talking about it a great deal.8 How we talk about it is a way of controlling it. We delineate what can and can’t be said, what is appropriate behavior and what not, a knowledge, or science, a discourse on sexuality that exercises control over it and thus control over us. Talking about things is how science or discourses of knowledge categorize and understand them in order to control and regulate them. Now there is a lot of politics in Foucault and I could go on and on, but I think I’ve made his point for him: knowledge is power, power over the world, and so liberation or freedom comes from refuting and rejecting such systems of knowledge, systems that seek to control us but which are historically relative. The world can be otherwise.
On Beyond Metanarratives
We all live within boundaries. Geographically, we live in cities in states in countries on earth. With respect to the values by which we judge, value, and live our lives we also live within boundaries, conceptual boundaries. We have expectations and evaluations foisted on us as men or women, mothers or fathers, sons or daughters, expectations based on our faith traditions, conceptions of health, sexuality and gender, occupation, culture, and so on. Insofar as these values are constitutive of who we are and are important to our sense of self, we follow the instructions of doctors, teachers, lawyers, parents, priests, accountants, and society in general. We do so hoping that we will live a highly, or adequately, functioning life. All these boundaries serve the same purpose—they organize and categorize the world around us and thereby our lives.
To some these boundaries are comforting. They provide meaning and purpose. They are comforting because they provide security so long as we stay within their limits. Conrad can know everything in his world so long as he stays between A and Z. How nice to know everything, how safe. And he’ll be told he’s smart for knowing all there is to be known, and he’ll be rewarded when he says “A is for Ape.” He’ll never have to be uncertain, uncomfortable, or confused again. Boundaries let us know what we ought to do, and being told what to do is comforting and probably important at some level. Kids need boundaries in order to feel safe. But the purpose of making a child feel safe is so that they can feel secure while exploring and growing. So boundaries can be beneficial, but they aren’t impregnable. Once we have grown it’s time for us to explore, and that means going beyond Z, past our boundaries.
Conrad realizes the benefit of going beyond Z once the narrator drags him from his dull classroom into a limitless world. There will be challenges beyond Z. New things require new skills, and sometimes we’ll fail. Beyond Z lies Zatz, which is used to spell Zatz-it, and “If you try to drive one / You’ll certainly see / Why most people stop at the Z / But not me!” (Zebra). Conrad can’t know what a Zatz-it is, nor can he drive one. But his world is broader for having added Zatz to his alphabet, and zatz the point. Postmodernity shows the limits of our world so that we might transgress them. We see the boundaries so we know where we can go when we choose to venture out into the wilderness.
Lyotard discusses the border lands as the pagus, that place where the village ends, a place of boundaries, ceaseless negotiations and ruses.9 As pagans we recognize a multiplicity of justices and the justice of recognizing multiplicity. “Justice here does not consist merely of observance of the rule; as in all the games, it consists in working at the limits of what the rules permit, in order to invent new moves, perhaps new rules, and therefore new games.”10 Foucault makes this multiplicity real by showing us alternatives, or rather the fact that boundaries are traversable. Things could’ve been otherwise, so they still can be. So we should be incredulous when someone says this is the way it is and always has been, or this is the only way it should be. In the end isn’t this also why we read Dr. Seuss, and especially why we read him to children. We want our children to be questioners and adventurers, not automatons, a child that simply meets everyone else’s expectations.
Postmodernity doesn’t seek to discover and communicate eternal truths. Postmodernity expresses a perspective, a point of view of a doubter, questioner, and adventurer. The Postmodern is about limitlessness. This perspective is often uncomfortable for the same reason Socrates’ questioning was unsettling; it requires that we always admit our ignorance while valuing the journey. It takes courage to walk beyond the boundaries and begin negotiations with the unknown. But this approach makes up for its lack of certainty with its beauty, a style of life worth living. It’s okay to head straight out of town and into the pagus; remember, “it’s opener there in the wide open air” (Places).
CHAPTER EIGHT
From There to Here, from Here to There, Diversity Is Everywhere
Tanya Jeffcoat
So often, when people talk about diversity they immediately start worrying about political correctness and thought police. But respecting diversity is about recognizing the cultural diversity surrounding us and analyzing the ways we treat people who are in any way different than us. And those differences are often so slight that strangers might not even recognize the distinctions—after all, to a stranger a Sneetch is a Sneetch. But within Sneetch society, the presence or absence of a star becomes a marker that determines the lived experience of each individual Sneetch. Whether according to skin tone, nationality, gender, sexuality, or possessions, humans exhibit the same sort of in-group/out-group behavior as the Sneetches. And, as Frantz Fanon so vividly points out,1 there are physical as well as psychological ramifications for those deemed as out-group, far beyond “moping and doping alone on the beaches” (Sneetches).
Too often, the anger and depression associated with being a member of the
out-group becomes desperation to join the privileged, even if it means forgetting (or despising) what we are. The Plain-Belly Sneetches modify their bodies to fit the ideals of the Star-Belly Sneetches, and humans likewise turn to a variety of “Fix-It Up Chappies” for alterations toward some totalizing norm or standard against which we must conform. Some turn to skin lighteners or plastic surgeries, while others attempt to purge their accents or deny their sexual preferences, and yet others sacrifice their families and their health in their attempt to climb the socioeconomic ladder, but, to one extent or another, all have fallen prey to the totalizing, one-size-fits-all tendencies and the normative hubris of the status quo. Dr. Seuss recognizes the harms that humans visit upon one another based upon such beliefs, yet still finds hope that “We can . . . and we’ve got to . . . do better than this.”2
If we’re to do better, then we must determine what stands in our way. The first obstacle is normative hubris, which is the arrogance that assumes that one way—OUR way—is the best way, not only for ourselves but for everyone else. Every society has norms or standards; without them, societies couldn’t function. But there is a difference between noticing that different communities drive on different sides of the road and making the claim that WE drive on the correct side of the road (or the more logical or morally superior side) and that everyone who does differently is wrong, illogical, mentally warped, or immoral, even if their way of doing things works just fine.
We see normative hubris in The Butter Battle Book, as the Zooks and the Yooks both are absolutely certain that their way of buttering bread is the best and only way to do so. Each group assumes the other is somehow inferior for having made a different cultural choice: The Yooks go so far as to claim that “you can’t trust a Zook who spreads bread underneath! / Every Zook must be watched! / He has kinks in his soul!” (Butter).
Normative hubris thus provides the first stumbling block to doing better, but it sets the stage for totalizing tendencies to develop within people. Once people decide that their way is the best way and that those who don’t agree are somehow essentially inferior, it becomes all too easy to justify discrimination and persecution. The most obvious examples of this totalizing tendency are probably political and religious persecution, but we find it whenever people are discriminated against for not living up to societal ideals of masculinity or femininity, for instance, or for refusing to stay in the closet and pretend to be something they are not. It occurs when those in authority or in the majority tell minorities that they are somehow inferior because their culture and ethnicity does not fit the norm but that they might be better accepted if they did a better job of conforming. In all these cases, one group—the one with power—insists that others either conform or be shunned or persecuted.
But Seuss provides another option to totalizing tendencies. Even in Happy Birthday to You, Seuss emphasizes the importance of recognizing that “I am I,” different and vital in a unique way from all those other individuals in society, or as he proclaims, “There is no one alive who is you-er than you!” (Birthday). In doing so, Seuss promotes a pluralism that encourages the individual to be something apart from those totalizing tendencies that continually try to mold people into a preset pattern and reject anyone who appears different than the norm. The lesson is an important one to learn because, for each of us, life is a continual encounter with the Other, individuals and groups who aren’t just like us.
Caught in the Snide: Encountering the Other
As we go through our lives, we often meet people who seem different than us, and many times our hearts start thumping and we try to get away as quickly as we can, even if it means losing our Grin-itch spinach, spending the night getting Brickel bush brickels in our britches, or trying to hide in a Snide bush (Scared). But there are other options we have when we encounter the Other. We can shrink back in fear and work to maintain our distance, but we can also realize that perhaps we aren’t as different as we first imagined, or at least that we can still form friendships despite our differences, even if the Other is a pair of empty, pale green pants. Unfortunately, we can also think of ways to exploit the Other, perhaps by treating the Other as a thing or an object for our benefit. When we do so, we form an I-It relationship because we aren’t treating the Other as fully human and deserving of the same considerations we expect for ourselves.3 In treating the Other as somehow less than, we take the first step toward exploitation and dehumanization. Slavery couldn’t have been possible if the slaveholders truly believed that the people enslaved were equal. Similarly, King Yertle, in forcing his subjects to function as his throne, treats them as objects instead of citizens and proves that he doesn’t care that they “are feeling great pain” and doesn’t believe that those “down on the bottom . . . too, should have rights” (Yertle). Yertle shows that he is interested only in his own power and status and is willing to use those he sees as Other as a means of securing both, no matter how his pursuit might undermine the happiness and possibilities of those he rules. This attitude appears in many types of discrimination, but all types start with someone believing that someone else is different and somehow deserves less because of it.
So dehumanization (an attempt to strip away someone else’s humanity, human dignity, and/or human rights) is one possible response to the Other, but so is humanization, which Paulo Freire calls humanity’s vocation, or calling. Freire also believes that the people who have been dehumanized are the ones best able to see the need for social changes; after all, they are the ones most directly damaged by dehumanizing conditions. When you haven’t been on the receiving end of discrimination, it’s easy to underestimate its harm, or even to assume that it doesn’t exist, at least not anymore. There is a certain blindness of the privileged that must be overcome if we are to act in humanizing rather than dehumanizing ways. The Star-Belly Sneetches, with their beach games and frankfurter roasts, took no notice of the Plain-Belly Sneetches around them and thus didn’t realize the alienation and despair that the others felt. It is only when they lost their status (and money to Sylvester McMonkey McBean) that they begin treating everyone as equal. Until then, they took their privilege for granted, assuming that they were deserving of special treatment and that the others were not.
Peggy McIntosh takes up the problem of blindness and attempts to find ways of seeing better in the hope of thereby doing better. She claims that one reason we don’t pay more attention to the discrimination around us is because most of us are taught not to see it or the ways that we have privileges that others do not share. Most of us are taught that there is equality of opportunity, but when we look closer at society, we can see problems with this belief. Some of us, like the Star-Belly Sneetches, are born into wealthy families, while others of us are so poor we don’t have enough food to eat. Do the children born into poverty have the same opportunities as the kids of the superwealthy? McIntosh doesn’t think so. Instead, she argues that it’s like we each wear an invisible knapsack containing items that help us out and that unfairly privilege us over others. For instance, she thinks that because she’s white and heterosexual, she hasn’t faced the types of discrimination faced by those who aren’t. To better help her understand discrimination and privilege, McIntosh has written lists of things she doesn’t have to worry about, simply because of her race and sexuality. As an example, McIntosh says that unlike many homosexuals and racial minorities, she “can be reasonably sure that [her new] neighbors . . . will be neutral or pleasant”4 when she relocates. Because of her privilege, she has a mobility that others lack. Like the Star-Belly Sneetches, she has both access and acceptance into places where others are shunned. But until she slowed down, paid attention, and wrote her lists, McIntosh wasn’t aware of the extent to which she was privileged and others were disadvantaged. This is the blindness that Freire points to, and it is one of the problems that the philosophy of diversity attempts to address.
Being on the receiving end of discrimination causes a number of problems; for instance, the Plain-Belly Sn
eetches were unable to join in with the elite of Sneetch society, and they suffered both physically and psychologically because of it. Frantz Fanon speaks as someone relegated to the status of the Other, and he details the oppression that results. In particular, he describes the anger, fear, depression, and alienation that so often accompany discrimination, and he expresses the need for what he calls disalienation, which is the process of overcoming alienation.5 Drawing upon Fanon, Sandra Bartky discusses the psychic violence done to those deemed Other, arguing that the psychologically oppressed internalize the negative stereotypes and assumptions about themselves in ways that are “dehumanizing and depersonalizing.”6 For instance, “suppose that I, the object of some stereotype, believe in it myself—for why should I not believe what everyone else believes? I may then find it difficult to achieve what existentialists call an authentic choice of self, or what some psychologists have regarded as a state of self-actualization.”7 We have all seen children who have been shamed and ridiculed to the point that they refuse to participate in activities that might lead to further abuse, regardless of their actual abilities, something we see in “The Sneetches” as the Plain-Belly children stand back and watch the Star-Belly activities that they know they can never join. The children’s own anxiety, depression, and self-blame will keep them from putting themselves into positions where they might fail. Until they overcome the “internalization of intimations of inferiority,”8 they will continue to “exercise harsh dominion over their own self-esteem,”9 and their lives will suffer because of it. Psychological oppression functions this way, with individuals absorbing negative views about themselves and living truncated or limited lives because of it.