Even reports meant to be sympathetic to the possibility that another better world could exist in us right now accept our social-Darwinian essence as a given. Consider a November New York Times piece on empathy and bullying in which David Bornstein wrote,
We know that humans are hardwired to be aggressive and selfish. But a growing body of research is demonstrating that there is also a biological basis for human compassion. Brain scans reveal that when we contemplate violence done to others we activate the same regions in our brains that fire up when mothers gaze at their children, suggesting that caring for strangers may be instinctual. When we help others, areas of the brain associated with pleasure also light up. Research by Felix Warneken and Michael Tomasello indicates that toddlers as young as 18 months behave altruistically.
Are we really hardwired to be aggressive and selfish, as Bornstein says at the outset? Are you? No evidence for such a statement need be given, even in an essay that provides plenty of evidence to the contrary, as it’s supposed to be a fact universally acknowledged, rather than an opinion.
THE COMPASSION BOOM
If I were to use the normal language of the marketplace right now, I’d say that compassion and altruism are hot. It might, however, be more useful to say that the question of the nature of human nature is being reconsidered at the moment by scientists, economists, and social theorists in all sorts of curious combinations and coalitions. Take, for example, the University of California’s Greater Good Science Center, which describes itself as studying “the psychology, sociology, and neuroscience of well-being, and teaches skills that foster a thriving, resilient, and compassionate society.” Founding director Dacher Keltner writes, “Recent studies of compassion argue persuasively for a different take on human nature, one that rejects the preeminence of self-interest.”
A few dozen miles away is Stanford’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education, which likewise draws on researchers in disciplines ranging from neuroscience to Buddhist ethics. Bornstein’s essay mentions another organization, Roots of Empathy in Toronto, that reduces violence and increases empathy among children. Experiments, programs, and activities like this proliferate.
Independent scholars and writers are looking at the same underlying question, and stories in the news this year—such as those on school bullying—address questions of how our society gets organized, and for whose benefit. The suicides of several queer young people generated a groundswell of anti-bullying organizing and soul-searching, notably the largely online “It Gets Better” attempt to reach out to queer youth.
In a very different arena, neoliberalism—the economic system that lets the invisible hand throttle what it might—has finally come into question in the mainstream (whereas if you questioned it in 1999, you were a troglodyte and a flat-Earther). Hillary Clinton lied her way through the 2008 primary, claiming she never supported NAFTA, and her husband, who brought it to us, publicly apologized for the way his policies eliminated Haiti’s rice tariffs. “It was a mistake,” Bill Clinton told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on March 10. “I had to live every day with the consequences of the loss of capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people because of what I did.”
Think of those doing the research on altruism and compassion as a radical scholarly movement, one that could undermine the philosophical and political assumptions behind our current economic system, which is also our political system. These individuals and organizations are putting together the proof that not only is another world possible, but it’s been here all along, as visible, should we care to look, as Nabokov’s butterflies.
Do not underestimate the power of this force. The world could be much better if more of us were more active on behalf of what we believe in and love; it would be much worse if countless activists weren’t already at work, from Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma and the climate activists in Tuvalu to the homeless activists around the corner from me. When I studied disasters past, what amazed me was not just that people behaved so beautifully but that, in doing so, they found such joy. It seems that something in their natures, starved in ordinary times, was fed by the opportunity, under the worst of conditions, to be generous, brave, idealistic, and connected; and when this appetite was fulfilled, the joy shone out, even amid the ruins.
Don’t think of this as simply a description of my hopes for the future, but of what was going on right under our noses; it’s a force we would do well to name, recognize, celebrate, and enlarge upon now. It is who we are, if only we knew it.
December 2010
INSIDE OUT, OR INTERIOR SPACE
(and Interior Decoration)
MUDDING AND TAPING
There are times when it’s clear to me that by getting and spending, we lay waste our powers, and times when, say, the apricot velvet headboard against the lavender wall of a room in an old hotel fills me with a mysterious satisfied pleasure in harmonies of color, texture, atmospheres of comfort, domesticity and a desire to go on living among such color and texture and space and general real estate. There are times when I believe in spiritual detachment, though there was a recent occasion when I bothered to go take a picture of my old reading armchair to the upholsterer’s around the corner to see if can be made beautiful again and worry about whether charcoal velveteen would go with my next decor. There are times when I enjoy the weightlessness of traveling and wish to own nothing and afternoons when I want to claim every farmhouse I drive by as my own, especially those with porches and dormers, those spaces so elegantly negotiating inside and out, as though building itself could direct and support an ideal life, the life we dream of when we look at houses.
For admiring houses from the outside is often about imagining entering them, living in them, having a calmer, more harmonious, deeper life. Buildings become theaters and fortresses for private life and inward thought, and buying and decorating is so much easier than living or thinking according to those ideals. Thus the dream of a house can be the eternally postponed preliminary step to taking up the lives we wish we were living. Houses are cluttered with wishes, the invisible furniture on which we keep bruising our shins. Until they become an end in themselves, as a new mansion did for the wealthy woman I watched fret over the right color for the infinity edge tiles of her new pool on the edge of the sea, as though this shade of blue could provide the serenity that would be dashed by that slightly more turquoise version, as though it could all come from the ceramic tile suppliers, as though it all lay in the colors and the getting. And yet . . .
I met a prodigal leftist at his house, where the infinitely intricate old Victorian sofa reupholstered in Indonesian ikat fabric amazed me, because it was so thoughtfully exquisite and because I didn’t know that revolutionaries were allowed to have such things—one of the dictates of the 1970s was that we would hold off on pleasure until after the revolution, and, as all the finger-smudged light switches, tattered posters and crusty kitchens of the collective households bore witness, at least some pleasures, notably the aesthetic ones, were being forestalled. There was another revolutionary, this one with a fugitive era behind her, whose apartment was an exquisite symphony of colors and nicely appointed forms, heavy Mexican goblets, shining floors, wide white-painted blinds set the expensive way inside the window frame. Even the cat that wandered across all the furniture, including the writing desk and the dining table, was Abyssinian, tawny with a pumpkin-colored underside that harmonized with the rest in this sanctuary from which to continue staging insurrections. Then there were the antinuclear radicals living outside the usual networks and inside an adapted school bus I remember best for including a sewing machine, a windowsill of potted plants, and a rack of preserves in pretty jars, held on during travel by a wooden bar across each row. Home sneaks in everywhere, even the gardens the interned Japanese Americans built in their doubly hostile desert camps, or in the way the endlessly displaced might tack up a calendar from home whose images continue to matter long after the months and days are past, even th
e newspaper and magazine clippings pasted on the walls of old prospector sheds abandoned in the desert long ago.
You feel it too, you who hold this book that is both a bundle of ideas and another twig to lay on the future fire of your home, though whether your lust lies in Eames chairs or old Doric pillars remains unknown to the writer who herself is sitting facing a white west wall with three panels of molding; has to her right a shelf with antlers, dolls, and books; and to her left, a bay window; and tilted on that wall before her, a bulletin board of pictures of horses, dead swans, phantom girls, a full-page magazine reproduction of Rosa Parks in her booking photograph, an old map of the world in which California is still an island, a few letters to answer, and some ancient African iron-bar money made to resemble fishes and birds, with fins and wings to keep it moving, all tacked up together; then to the right, on the desk, a little egg cup filled with soft oval gray beach stones flecked with a lighter, more translucent stone; and on the desk itself, a preserves jar used as a pencil cup, a brooch and a turquoise necklace waiting to be put away, an article on the ravaged landscape of Baghdad, a calculator, and an old sewing machine parts tin labeled Brother, filled with the cards of an endless wave of meetings and encounters, and a sea of papers.
WALNUT VENEER
Maybe it’s important to make a distinction between what gets called materialism and what real materialism might be. By materialistic we usually mean one who engages in craving, hoarding, collecting, accumulating with an eye to stockpiling wealth or status. There might be another kind of materialism that is simply a deep pleasure in materials, in the gleam of water as well as silver, the sparkle of dew as well as diamonds, an enthusiasm for the peonies that will crumple in a week as well as the painting of peonies that will last. This passion for the tangible might not be so possessive, since the pleasure is so widely available; much of it is ephemeral, and some of it is cheap or free as clouds. Then too, the hoarding removes the objects—the Degas drawing, the diamond necklace—to the vault where they are suppressed from feeding anyone’s senses.
One of the top ninety-nine peculiarities about houses and homes is that they are both: real-estate speculation and sanctuary. Artists have a different relation to the material, since, after all, the main animosity toward the realm of substances and solid objects is that they distract from the life of the mind or spirit; but it’s the job of artists to find out how materials and images speak, to make the mute material world come to life, and this too undoes the divide. Words of gold, of paint, of velvet, of steel, the speaking shapes and signs that we learn to read, the intelligence of objects set free to communicate and to teach us that all things communicate, that a spoon has something to say about values, as does a shoe rack or a nice ornamental border of tulips and freesias. But just as passion can become whoredom, as home becomes real estate, so the speaking possibility of the material world can degenerate into chatter and pitches: the latest catalogue in my mailbox proclaims, “BLUSH: pales beyond comparison. These edgier new pinks are a lot less about yesterday’s innocence and a lot more about today’s soft modern. Just a blush quietly steals the scene in key moments. Like these sheer glass dessert plates. Or exaggerated shirt-striped bed linens.” And the pink is a very nice pink too, in the photographs, even without the coconut-covered cake atop the pink cake platter. Desire is easy. And everywhere.
DRAINBOARD
Maybe a house is a machine to slow down time, a barrier against history, a hope that nothing will happen, though something always does. But the materials themselves are sometimes hedges against time, the objects that change and decay so much more slowly than we do, the empire bed in which were conceived children who died a century ago, the old silverware from weddings several wars before that you can buy at the better garage sales, the ones held by people who seldom moved so that objects could drift down on them like muffling snow over the decades until death or dissolution obliged them to dig out. Those estate sales in the houses where an old person has died—I went to one recently near UCLA. The vast accumulation of what must have been a marriage begun in the 1940s or 1950s—a prosperous conventional life with side tables, fake pearls, Persian rugs, silver ewers, china vases, dollhouse dishes, old-fashioned luggage, and more—was all laid out for strangers to browse, the equipment of a particular life turned back into commodities the way that a stricken body is broken down into organ donations.
CONSTRUCTION SITE
The best piece of furniture in classical literature is Penelope and Odysseus’s marriage bed, which has as one bedpost an olive tree growing out of the ground of the bedroom, a bed that Odysseus in some pre-Homeric moment of home improvement made himself. But the rooted bed seems to belong most truly to Penelope, who remains homebound, while another piece of carpentry, a wooden ship, belongs to Odysseus, who moves endlessly, restlessly in the book that bears his name before arriving back in the territory that is synonymous with Penelope. Twenty years later he returns, and she tests him by offering to have their bed moved to another room. His knowledge that it’s immovable confirms his true identity: furniture reaffirms the marriage.
It often seems that the house is an extension of the female body, and the car, of the male body, for thus go the finicky and exacting arenas of self-improvement, the space that represents the eroticized self; and in these female interiors and male rockets lies the old literary division of labor, of travelers and keepers of the flame, of the female as a fixture in the landscape the male traverses and conquers. Certainly historically, men had far more mobility than women. Until Odysseus comes home, but then the story stops. And the legend has him restless, leaving again, to sail beyond the Gates of Hercules and into the unknown, a gate Virginia Woolf sailed past from within her house and by leaving it on foot to prowl London. She wrote in annoyance at the limits of life in the living room, “For there we sit surrounded by objects which perpetually express the oddity of our own temperaments and enforce the memories of our own experience.” Inside, it’s harder to be someone else; houses are anchors and even dead weights on the transmigratory drift of souls, dog tags that are as much bigger than their owner as the dogs are to the tags. We want both, to burn it down and be no one and to be recognized by the dog on the daily walk up the drive from work, and we get both but never exactly when and how we imagined it.
Athenian women, writes Richard Sennett, “were confined to houses because of their supposed physiological defects.” Another architectural historian, Mark Wigley, writes,
In Greek thought women lack the internal self-control credited to men as the very mark of their masculinity. This self-control is no more than the maintenance of secure boundaries. These internal boundaries . . . cannot be maintained by a woman because her fluid sexuality endlessly overflows and disrupts them. And more than this she endlessly disrupts the boundaries of others, that is, men. . . . In these terms the role of architecture is explicitly the control of sexuality, or more precisely, women’s sexuality, the chastity of the girl, the fidelity of the wife. . . . While the house protects the children from the elements, its primary role is to protect the father’s genealogical claims by isolating women from other men.
The house was a container for the uncontained, a prison for those who might—not in their linear trajectories but their social mores—go out of bounds, and thus it is that Odysseus sleeps around with various princesses and nymphs on his sea voyage while Penelope wards off her suitors and waits, settled into the stasis that domestic space is meant to embody anyway. You can imagine a modern version in which they live on a houseboat or a motor home so that motion and stasis, discovery and comfort are not divided and dispatched along opposite directions.
KITCHEN ISLAND
Martha Stewart was both Penelope and Odysseus, a trickster building an empire by playing a homemaker. She sold paradise, or the path to it, and it made her and the major stockholders in Martha Stewart Omnimedia rich, even if Omnimedia sounded kind of like Ozymandias. For several years her food-and-home magazine triumphantly presented a vi
sion of idealized life and instructions on the journey toward it. In the absolute paradise—Eden before the fall, Virgil’s Golden Age—work is unnecessary. “Ripe fruit,” as Andrew Marvell remarked, “doth drop about my head,” and the trees that drop it don’t need pruning or fertilizing either. But this vision has faded away. In its place is the silver age, in which leisure and labor are combined into a harmonious whole, a pastoral, or rather, a georgic. In recent years, a whole genre of literature of restoring the country home, usually in some fabulous part of Europe, has arisen as the modern version, a This Old House in the Peaceable Kingdom—part catalogue, part travelogue, part instruction manual—in this era when executives all seem to wish they were chefs. Stewart’s great contribution was to make the setting of the stage into the drama itself.
Her empire’s putative subject is pleasurable leisure but its subtext is always labor, a labor redeemed or at least redecorated as pleasure, an interminable journey disguised as arrival. There are considerable pleasures in pruning the roses, as there are in pumping iron, but they are not leisure in the old sense of the word. The moment of arrival is always delayed, for that is the moment of true idleness. Being present in the sphere of friendship, of love, of amiable society does not quite happen in her world. In Stewart’s world the bride is always getting dressed, the hostess is always setting the table for the guests who have not yet arrived, like Penelope weaving and unweaving at her loom to forever delay the moment when she must choose a suitor to marry, only this Penelope seems to have skipped the suitors or forgotten them in favor of the loom. It recalls Jorge Luis Borges’s essay on Achilles and the tortoise, playing with an old paradox of Zeno’s—that if time can be divided infinitely, then Achilles racing a tortoise will never catch up because both will move through an infinite number of increments that eternally delay arrival. The repainting of the window frames, the arranging of the wreaths, the crafting of the candlesticks, the growing of the sage for the scones for the basket for the breakfast table for the Easter whose resurrection always remains on the horizon.
The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness Page 17