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[nonamememoir]

The Bar by Tori Bloom

Setting

It was uncomfortably warm in the bar that night. It was dimly lit and sparsely crowded. The neon light that hung over the liquor fizzled and flickered. The bar itself was sticky from rings of condensation and drinks that had been spilled and forgotten. In one corner of the room a couple whispered unintelligibly and pawed at one another. In the other corner a man sat alone and drew circles on the table with his thumb, his mind dulled by his fifth glass of bourbon. Outside, the moon hung low in the sky, but that didn’t stop lovers from kissing in the backseat of their cars or teenagers from crouching behind dumpsters and passing around a cigarette.

A lonely martini glass sat on the bar, swirling fuchsia liquid with a sweet scent filling it to the brim. A man’s fingers curled around the glass and he brought it up to his lips.

Protagonist

There was a charm even in his frown, a warmth like the violet flush of nightshade. His jaw was cut and framed by scruff, and his green eyes were set deep in his head. His hair curled against his cheeks, auburn under the fluorescent glow of the neon light. His looks were inviting, but his eyes were cold. This coldness might have repelled company, but Micah was skilled in seduction. All of his time spent observing translated into an excellent ability to predict how people would behave and react, and what he should say to get the reaction that he wanted.

Sometimes Micah would come to the bar and predict how a conversation would play out, or if it intrigued him enough he would intervene and attempt to influence the situation. Often times he recoiled at how others behaved when they weren’t aware that they were being observed. Above all he despised stupidity. He would liken his obsession with human behavior to masochism if anyone asked, because more often than not people were stupid. For instance, the bartender was stupid for asking him for the tenth weekend in a row what he would like to drink.

“Pomegranate martini. Thanks.”

The woman that sat beside him was stupid for eyeing him up every weekend at least five times a night without introducing herself.

His brother was stupid for calling and leaving a third voicemail on his phone.

Dialogue

“You know, I’ve seen you around here but I haven’t had the courage to say introduce myself until now,” the woman lied. It wasn’t courage that finally broke through her silence. That night he was wearing a suit, and he found that people, in general, were more willing to talk to a man when he was decked out in Armani. Still, he smiled warmly. She was an attractive young woman. She had curly locks and brown skin that was painted with freckles. Her eyes were the kind that could peer right through you, and maybe that scared him a little.

“You’re only on your second drink,” Micah noted, a smirk playing at his lips. He could see her pupils dilate. “Make that third. Bartender?” He gestured for the man to refill the lady’s cup.

“Oh. You really didn’t have to do that.” She feigned humility. Of course he had to. “But thanks. I’m Emily, by the way.”

“Micah. Some people call me Gabriel, though. My last name.” He kept a smile on his lips, even though the small talk was draining him. His internal monologue was one continuous groan. “I guess Micah is just too ‘out there’.”

“I like Micah. It’s...different.” She sipped at her new cup and watched him with the intrigue that he’d seen on every other face he’d encountered. Even if people could not see behind the mask that he had crafted, the seduction of the unknown peeked out now and again, like the sensuality of it could not be contained by his facade. Or, maybe it was just the suit again.

His phone buzzed again and he glanced it. Of course it was his brother.

“That’s the fourth time I’ve heard your phone go off. Must be important.” He wasn’t sure, but her tone sounded almost accusatory. “Aren’t you going to answer?”

“It would be rude not to give you my full attention.” Micah leaned forward just a bit, his chin held up by his palm. He watched the blood rise to her cheeks.

“Are you usually such a kiss-up?” The girl’s eyes flashed with mischief.

“I don’t know. Is it working?” he countered with ease, and he could see the resignation in her expression.

“Unfortunately, yes.” She glanced down at the time on her phone. Either he had imagined that suspicion or his flattery had chipped away at it. “Look, I don’t normally do this, and especially not so soon after introducing myself, but how about we get out of here?”

“Well, I’ve got nothing better to do.” He downed his drink and took her hand, sparing a glance at the lovers in the corner on their way out.

An hour later they were curled up in her bed, her head on his chest. She had fallen asleep to the sound of his breaths. His fingers brushed out tangles in her curls and then traced down her spine, visible in the glow of the moonlight. Their bliss was interrupted when his phone buzzed again from its spot on her nightstand and Emily shifted in her sleep, letting out a moan of protest.

“Just answer your phone. Or put it on silent for God’s sake,” she complained, sitting up and letting the sheets fall from her naked body. “Actually, you’ve got me curious. So how about you tell me why you’ve been ignoring your phone for hours?” Her brows furrowed. “If you’re married, just tell me.”

“I’m not married.” Micah laughed, although it felt entirely fake on his lips.

“Then pick up the phone,” she insisted, “Or I will.”

He had been hoping to avoid this. Frankly, he should have put the phone on silent, but he had been curious just how many times his brother would actually attempt to call him before he gave up. There was something pleasing and sadistic about ignoring his calls. Now, with Emily’s demand, there was always the option of simply leaving without answering the phone, but it would make things inconvenient if he ever ran into her in the future. The last thing he wanted were rumors of imagined infidelity. He could picture the disgust on strangers’ faces and the pride they’d take in their superiority. Micah glanced at his phone and let out a sigh, resigned. He’d brought it on himself.

Flashback

He was meant to write her eulogy. It came as no surprise, considering how distraught Will was. He doubted the kid could get through a few lines without bursting into tears. Micah wasn’t thrilled about the task, but he did his part. He stood up at the podium, uncomfortably close to his mother’s corpse, and looked out over the crowd.

“My mother was an ambitious woman up until the day she died. She did everything to provide for us, and for that I will always be grateful. I know that I’m going to miss her in my life, but I choose to believe that it’s what she did in life that mattered.” Micah was surprised with his own honesty. He had been planning to use more cliches and perhaps even fake a few tears, but as he stood up there he realized how easy it was to miss her.

After the eulogy was over he didn’t stick around. It was bad enough with an atmosphere of death and decay poisoning the air around him, but then he had people coming up to him and hugging him, telling him how heartfelt his speech was. He couldn’t stand their fake sympathy. It made him sick.

Conflict

“So? Who was it?” the woman asked, and he cursed himself for choosing such a nosy bed mate, but worn down by a long day and a few too many drinks, he let his mask slip.

“My brother. He’s pissed at me for leaving our mom’s funeral early today,” Micah sighed, “I avoided answering him because I really didn’t feel like trying to deal with his sobbing. Frankly, that’s why I left early in the first place. And I hate crowds… and funeral homes.” He found it amusing how just a few minutes ago he was worried about drama coming out of this one night stand, and yet now he was purposefully concocting some.

“Oh. That’s awful. I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have… now I feel like I took advantage of you.” Emily’s eyes went soft. She was a sweet girl, he thought.

“No, trust me, you didn’t,” he assured her, his arms wrapping around her waist.

“You know…” She pulled back a bit, but there was less reservation in her expression. It was comical how the most macabre confessions brought about intimacy. “You can talk about it. I know I’m just some girl from a bar, but, I mean… how are you feeling about it?”

It would be easy to say that he felt awful, and to explain that the reason he felt no empathy for his brother was that his mother was abusive or that she treated him differently. Still, there was something about her that fascinated him. He knew she was stupid but would she be afraid if he told her the truth?

“Honestly? I feel complete and utter apathy,” he answered, his lips in a flat line and eyes devoid of any playfulness. Despite that he pulled her back to his chest, although she didn’t fall as easily as she had earlier.

“Apathy?” A look of fear marred her delicate features, peering up at him through the dark.

“She was a good mom, and now she’s dead,” he said, as if stating the weather. His hair clung to the sheen of sweat on his skin and all of the charm that twinkled in his eyes faded with his facade. “I guess I’ll miss her, but that’s the extent of it.” Emily watched him like he was under her magnifying glass. The quiet calm had dissipated, and tension laid like electricity between them.

“She must have done something awful to you.” He could almost see her thoughts churning, trying to come up with some comprehensible explanation for his vacant expression, his seemingly sunny demeanor all evening, and the way his voice dropped into monotone in a second. “I couldn’t blame you. It’s hard to feel anything for people that hurt us.” Her voice dripped with sincerity, but he could feel her heart racing where her chest pressed against him.

“She wasn’t abusive at all. I actually think I loved her..”  It was silent for a few beats after he finished talking. The pauses kept getting longer.

“Oh.” Was all she could mouth, bewildered by the confession. It was a knife that cut through the suspense. “Look…uh, it’s getting late. I think you should leave.” Emily sat up, pulling the sheets with her and bunching them up at her chest.

“I was just being honest.” Micah tilted his head a bit. It was so fascinating how quickly her blood went cold. Part of him had hoped she would understand, but like a devotee looking at the face of God she trembled.

“You just told me that your mom died and that you couldn’t care less. That’s not normal.” All of the openness in her expression had faded and was replaced with a look so frosty it might have scared anyone else. “You should get help. Go to grief counseling or something.”

“Why would I go to grief counseling? I just told you that I have no grief.” He laughed and brushed his fingers through his hair. He paused, a brilliant and perhaps cruel idea popping up in his head. “What if I told you that I killed her?” Micah pondered as he stood up, his face still a blank slate. Emily’s expression melted into what he could only describe as shell-shocked. He chuckled as he slipped into his clothes.

“You’re sick.”

Micah spared the woman a final glance as he headed toward her bedroom door.

“So I’m a monster because I’m not like you?” His hands slipped into his pockets, a stance too casual for the circumstances. His charm had not completely faded, but it was overwhelmed by an aura of power and uncertainty. In that moment he resembled a politician or, on a more extreme scale, someone like Ted Bundy.

“Yes. No. I don’t know, just please go.” Emily stole a look in the direction of her nightstand. In one swift movement she opened the drawer and pulled out a pocket knife, knuckles white as she gripped the handle. “You’re what? You’re a sociopath? Were you going to kill me? Is that was this is about? Is that why you were at the bar every week?”

“Wow. Just because I don’t empathize doesn’t mean I don’t have any feelings. Way to hurt my feelings, Em.” He frowned, his lower lip pushing out into a pout. He couldn’t keep that expression for long, a smile breaking through. “This isn’t an Investigation Discovery show, put the damn knife away,” he laughed and she lowered the knife. “Well at least one of us was honest tonight,” he paused, “Tell your husband that I dropped by.”

Micah went back to the bar the next weekend and sat by himself. The seat where Emily had sat was empty, and he soaked in the inevitable disillusionment.

“Pomegranate martini, right?”

“Yeah.”

[nonamememoir]

Literature as an Invaluable Philosophical Tool by Tori Bloom

What makes literature different from traditional philosophy is the introduction of fictional worlds to explain real concepts. Philosophy is formulaic, with the use of premises and conclusions that are supported by logic and facts (Nanay, 2013). Literature does not follow this formula, and it also exists outside of our world’s logic. However, because of the fantastic nature of literature, readers are exposed to experiences they may not have had elsewhere. In this way, literature can introduce readers to new concepts and ways of thinking. Catherine Elgin (2014) likens literature to a thought experiment. Thought experiments, she explains, are experiments that are often impossible to perform in real world, but still hold truth because they can help to clarify the facts of a situation. In fact, one might argue that literature and thought experiments in general can hold insights that philosophy on its own might not. The worlds and characters that exist in literature do not exist outside of the confines of those books, but they can share characteristics of the real world as well as truths. The intention of the writer is also important, as some pieces of literature are written as a response to a philosophical piece, with dialogue, characterization, themes, and more that work to defend or attack an idea. This is not to say that there are no limitations, however. One limitation is that there is a disconnect between literature and philosophy, as philosophy is a subject of pure logic, while literature relies on things that are made up. Another flaw is that literature depends on the reader, and Vladimir Nabokov argues in Good Readers and Good Writers that it is the mark of a bad reader to project onto the characters. This is because in projecting one’s own values, personality, and morals onto a novel readers may not be open to the new concepts that that work has to offer. Literature is open to interpretation, which means that it the truth about the world that one reader draws from the work might not be the truth that another draws. While there are both flaws and benefits to applying literature in the way that one would apply philosophy, the benefits outweigh the flaws, and in fact literature is an invaluable tool because it exposes people to new lines of thinking that pure logic and empirical studies can’t.

Even empirical studies are often prefaced by thought experiments, as performing an experiment requires an imagined hypothesis.  For example, without knowing Newton’s laws of gravity and aerodynamics, one can hypothesize that a ten pound rock would fall faster than ten pounds of loose feathers. We can picture a rock falling, and feathers floating down at a slower pace. This imaginary experiment brings about more questions. If those feathers were stuck together to form a solid block of feathers, would they then fall at the same speed as the rock? We can imagine that they would, and wonder why this is. This can lead us to the idea that perhaps the shape, density, or interaction with air influences the rate of fall. With this in mind, Elgin says that even in empirical science, thought experiments help to illuminate facts and eliminate the need for unnecessary experiments. In fact, she argues that thought experiments are necessary because they help to avoid real-world variables that may affect an empirical study. In the feather analogy, for instance, a thought experiment does not involve forces such as the wind. It should be noted that thought experiments do not eliminate the need for empirical studies, but that they help researchers know what questions to ask, and thus what experiments to conduct.

Philosophers use thought experiments as well, as many theories about how the world works simply cannot be tested outside of imagination (Elgin, 2014). The concept of utilitarianism as a form of justice, for example, relies on the idea that in a perfect world, pleasure and displeasure could be quantified and used as a basis for morality. Perhaps we could test this empirically, but there is no way to test whether overall pleasure versus displeasure measures morality. The use of thought experiments is debated because concepts like utilitarianism, which is founded on the idea of a situation free of third variables, do not occur in real life, and thus cannot be empirically proven (Elgin, 2014). However, an inability to conduct an experiment does not disprove it. In the feather and rock thought experiments for example, one could come to the conclusion that surface area and air affect rate of fall. If this could not be tested, that would not make it any less true. If it were impossible to test, the idea could still be supported by things that occur without outside influence. For example, a leaf falling from a tree drifts slowly to the ground, while a twig simply fall. Thought experiments are the same, stemming from the logic of the real world. One could, for example, argue against utilitarianism by using an example in which a greater number of lives saved does not necessarily equate to a good moral decision. The Holocaust brought about millions of deaths and suffering, but also medical advancements and German prosperity. While one could argue that the medical advancements and economic prosperity brought about more overall conservation of human life, is it just to say that because more lives were saved that it was morally good? Is it only the lives lost that contribute to the quantified suffering? Should torture be a higher amount of suffering than death? These questions bring more ambiguity to the validity of turning human emotions into numbers and casts doubt on the utilitarian perspective on justice, as it is simply too subjective. However, pure logic does not lend itself  even to branches of philosophy that involve empirical science (Nanay, 2013). Bence Nanay argues that philosophy of all forms does not only tell us how the world functions objectively and logically, but how we perceive these functions. In David Foster Wallace’s The Broom of the System there is a part where Mr. Beadsman reminisces about his mother and how she had once asked him what the fundamental part of the broom was. He responded that the bristles were most fundamental, but she pointed out that the only reason he answered the bristles was because he wanted to broom to sweep. If, on the other hand, he had wanted the broom to break a window, it would be the handle that was the fundamental part of the broom (Wallace, 2010, p. 150). Philosophy seeks to examine function, but like the broom analogy, function is always dependent on what we wish to get out of something.

Literature is like a thought experiment because both follow a narrative, both illuminate facts about the world, and both require interpretation and suspension of disbelief (Elgin, 2014). Literature involves a set of circumstances that exist outside of the real world, unaffected by third variables, and yet one can find patterns in literature that also exist in the world. With The Awakening by Kate Chopin readers can gain insight into what it might have been like to be woman in the 1800s and may recognize patterns and symbols in Edna’s life that demonstrate the struggle between freedom and ignorance. Specifically, the imagery of a bird is used in this novel. The first mention of a bird is a parrot in the cage at the very beginning of the novel, and later on Mademoiselle Reisz says to Edna, as she becomes more and more independent, that "The bird that would soar above the level of plain tradition and prejudice must have strong wings. It is a sad spectacle to see the weaklings bruised, exhausted, fluttering back to earth.” (Chopin, 1994, p. 79). In fact it is suggested that what brings Edna crashing back down to the Earth is her inability to connect to others, as they remain caged, unable to see the bars that hold them in (Clark, 2008). Zoila Clark (2008) argues for a Foucauldian reading of The Awakening, suggesting that the oppression that the women in the novel face is a function of the society that they take part in. That is, people take part in their own oppression unwittingly. This, Clark says, is exemplified by the character Adele Ratignolle, who finds identity in the motherly nature that society deems acceptable for her. However, even Edna was subject to this internalized oppression, from her choice of a loveless marriage based on convenience to the fact that she had repressed her passion for painting in favor of being a mother. While Edna’s experiences are not real, they provide a snapshot of a life that could have existed in reality and might still today. The lives of fictional characters are important, as Elgin points out, because if we were to base philosophy on only real people, any look into human experience would be overwhelmed by detail. Unlike Edna Pontellier, a real woman is in a continuous narrative of outside forces that does not have the goal of making a commentary on social patterns. So, like a thought experiment, literature provides a world free of third variables that illuminates problems in the world and possible solutions.

Fiction can even outperform philosophy in some ways, as it can give insight into how  social and cultural relationships develop and function when the reader cannot experience the relationship for himself . Go Tell it On the Mountain by James Baldwin (2013) is a fictional story, but the author himself is a gay, African American, male and relies on feelings from his own life to tell the story of John Grimes. Unlike a biography, ethnography, or other non-fiction account, fiction allows the reader to get inside the mind of the main character and go through the story as if those experiences were their own. Perspectives one might not have otherwise had become a possibility. One might not have even considered, before reading Go Tell it On the Mountain, the struggle of living in a community that deals with religion, as well as racism and sexism from both within and outside of the community. The novel does not set forth any premises, nor does it give some sort of conclusion that the reader is meant to come to. However, through the eyes of a preacher who excuses his own sins and hatred and a woman who hates her own skin color, James Baldwin critiques religion on the basis of his own upbringing. We are not specifically told that John’s father is meant to be an archetype of the corrupt preacher, or that his Aunt’s skin-whitening is a product of racism, but the readers are meant to draw these conclusions through experience. However, even if one were to grow up in a similar environment to John’s, that does not mean nothing could be gained from the story. Deleuze (1997) says that literature is the art of becoming some non-specific thing. It is not identity or a state that matters, but the process that one goes through. If a reader were to go into a novel with the thought in mind that they understood the characters because of how they identify with them, any new insights that the character would offer might be disregarded because the personal connection would overshadow how the character’s struggles are applicable to a group as whole. For example, in the case of John Grimes, a reader might identify with issues regarding his repressed sexuality and fail to let themselves experience how intimately connected his repression is to his religion and his culture. Furthermore, the reader must realize that this connection is the experience of a gay, black, teen and not just John Grimes.

Literature is also beneficial because, not only does it allow readers to learn new perspectives through experiences, it can present responses to philosophical pieces that already exist and provide new insight. For example, Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice can be seen as response to Plato’s theories on beauty and the pursuit of Good (White, 1990). Plato’s theory posits that erotic love generates passion, which can bring forth motivation and the pursuit of knowledge (White, 1990). White discusses Plato’s Charmides, and how Socrates was taken by the boy, Charmides, beauty. According to White, Plato’s writings suggest that it was Charmides’ beauty that brought forth Socrates’ discussion of temperance and that, although no conclusion on the meaning of temperance was made, Socrates’ reaches temperance by maintaining self-control. Death in Venice, White says, contradicts the idea of erotic love as a catalyst for pursuing knowledge. This novel is reminiscent of the socratic, from the romantic setting of Venice, to the relationship between Aschenbach and Tadzio, which resembles pederasty in ancient Greece (White, 1990). However, as Aschenbach finds himself entangled in this unspoken relationship with Tadzio, he does not seek knowledge. In fact, where he was once a writer who would often work himself into sickness, Aschenbach abandons his trade in favor of his obsession with Tadzio. White points out that Plato’s ideas on erotic love and the pursuit of good that Aschenbach uses as an excuse to keep his obsession going. Yet we are meant to see that Aschenbach’s relationship with Tadzio is not good, as he abandons his passion, puts his own life in danger, and risks Tadzio’s life because he fantasizes about the boy dying young and forever beautiful. More evidence of this lies in the imagery of the novel, and in particular the use of myth. Throughout the work, Aschenbach runs into multiple red-haired men. The first man leaves him feeling a desire to travel, the second man transports him in a Gondola, and the third who plays a guitar and stinks of bactericide. It could be that the red hair is representative of the devil, as with each red-haired man, Aschenbach is further lured toward his impending death. The first man draws him to Venice, the second brings him to Venice by gondola, and the third who hints at the outbreak. The gondolier is particularly interesting, as he may symbolize the ferryman of the underworld, taking Aschenbach across the river Styx. Then, by the time the third man comes and Aschenbach begins to learn about the outbreak, he has been completely seduced by Tadzio. He knows that his life is in danger, but he chooses to stay. Aschenbach is drawn toward his death, but it is ultimately his own choices that bring him there. His relationship with Tadzio leaves him disillusioned by his life, as he notes that it would not be possible for him to leave Venice and return to his life before this ordeal. In the end, erotic love did not lead Aschenbach toward a pursuit of knowledge. In opposition to Nietzsche's ideas, Aschenbach begins as a representation of the hard-working and rule-abiding Apollonian artist, and he ends his story after being seduced by the Dionysian to the point of excess (White, 1990). There is no middle point between the two, and Aschenbach’s journey certainly did not provide evidence for Plato’s idea of erotic love as fuel for the pursuit of higher knowledge.

Fiction can have flaws that philosophical pieces might not. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (2012), for example, is a novel that illustrates the benefits and the pitfalls of literature working in the same way that philosophy does. While the novel provides insight into feminist theory, it is an example of how literature is subjective and how certain patterns may be disregarded when a reader does not allow himself to go through the process of becoming. Nabokov says that impersonal imagination should be used when reading literature, so that readers do not allow their own preconceptions to affect the message. In the case of Frankenstein, it is often read as a story about the dangers of playing God, and in assuming this is what Mary Shelley meant to say, one might fail to see the feminist undertones of the story. The birth of the monster in Frankenstein, and his tortured life after, could be seen as a criticism of the sciences, but there are other readings. Nancy Yousef (2002), for instance, holds that Frankenstein is a response to several philosophers, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his theory on man as a solitary animal. Yousef says that Shelley is critiquing this idea, which proposes that men come about on their own and might be solitary creatures if all of their needs were provided for. The monster is born alone, without the presence of a woman or any other human for that matter, and the result is not a man with human characteristics, but a monster (Yousef, 2002). It is not, however, solely a critique, as John Locke’s theory of man also comes into play, and he says that a solitary man will not evolve. Frankenstein seems to support this idea, and takes it perhaps a step further by noting that men who believe themselves to be solitary, for example Walton, who claims to have no friend and yet sends letters to his sister, are not in the same set of circumstances as the monster (Yousef, 2002). The monster has never had intimacy, in any form, and though he reads about human behavior and observes the Delacey family, he does not begin to assimilate into society. Instead, the monster begins to realize how different he is from human beings, and he seeks to gain intimacy when he has a conversation with the blind man. Still, the creature is rejected and Yousef says that it is not necessarily his appearance that makes him alone, but that he is different because he began his life as a fully formed man, without childhood or motherly affection. This perspective on Frankenstein, as Shelley’s commentary on the absence of the feminine and of man as being a solitary animal, can be forgotten in favor of the idea of Frankenstein as a novel about the dangers of playing God. This reveals how, despite the benefits of literature, there is a certain unavoidable flaw in how subjective the interpretations can be.

Literature is tool that can illuminate what to look for to explain how the world functions. It can be a response to an already existing philosophical theory, or it can be a commentary on some social pattern that the writer himself has seen or experienced. It performs the functions of philosophy by existing as an extended thought experiment, and revealing truths about the world. In fact, in some ways it can outperform philosophy, in that it allows readers to imagine a world free of third variables and it can allow people to have experiences that would be impossible in the real world. It also allows all people, even those who have experienced being a part of a certain minority group for example, to go through the process of becoming. It is the general experiences that matter, and what it means to be a woman, an animal, and so forth, rather than some specific thing. In becoming some general thing, one might begin to understand what it means to be that thing, and how different social patterns result in how that thing functions. Literature can also provide a new perspective on philosophical theories that exist, either providing evidence for the theory or against it. Pieces of fiction like Death in Venice show how Plato’s theories on erotic love and the pursuit of higher understanding do not always hold. Some criticisms of literature performing the functions of philosophy include its subjectivity and lack of empiricism, but philosophy itself is not without these flaws. After all, any commentary on how something functions is dependent on our perception of the thing and what we want it to do. Still, fiction is subject to the reader, and in order to gain any insight from a piece, the reader must go into the work without preconceptions and without projecting onto the piece. Yet philosophy itself has unavoidable flaws, such as the inability to test certain theories in the real world. Literature is not pure logic, but the world is not either. It can illuminate facts about the world that can’t be tested. This is why literature is not only useful as a philosophical tool, but invaluable. Just as scientists use thought experiments to know what hypotheses to form and test, philosophy must use literature to inform theories about how the world works.

References

Baldwin, J. (2013). Go tell it on the mountain. New York: Vintage International.

Chopin, K. (n.d.). The awakening. NY, NY: Avon Books, a division of the Hearst Corporation.

Clark, Z. (2008). The Bird that Came out of the Cage: A Foucauldian Feminist Approach to Kate Chopin's The Awakening. Journal for Cultural Research, 12(4), 335-347. doi:10.1080/14797580802553999

Deleuze, G., Smith, D., & Greco, M. (1997). Literature and Life. Critical Inquiry, 23(2), 225-230. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343982

Elgin, C. Z. (2014). Fiction as Thought Experiment. Perspectives on Science, 22(2), 221-241. doi:10.1162/posc_a_00128

Mann, T. (1994). Death in Venice: A new translation, backgrounds and context critisism. New York: W.W. Northon & Company.

Nabokov, V. (n.d.). Good Readers and Good Writers. Lecture.

Nanay, B. (2013). Philosophy versus Literature? Against the Discontinuity Thesis. Journal Of Aesthetics And Art Criticism, 71(4), 349-360.

Shelley, M. W., & Hunter, J. P. (2012). Frankenstein: The 1818 text, contexts, criticism. New York: W.W. Norton &.

Wallace, D. F. (2010). The broom of the system. New York: Penguin Books.

White, R. (1990). Love, Beauty, and Death in Venice. Philosophy and Literature, 14(1), 53-64. doi:10.1353/phl.1990.0106

Yousef, N. (2002). The Monster in a Dark Room: Frankenstein, Feminism, and Philosophy. Modern Language Quarterly, 63(2), 197-226. doi:10.1215/00267929-63-2-197

[nonamememoir]

The Ethics Behind the Conservation of Endangered Animals by Tori Bloom

It may seem like common sense to want to save endangered species from extinction. However, animals species sometimes go extinct from natural causes. Some argue that going out of our way to protect animal species actually goes against what is natural (Michael, 2005). In grade school we were taught that the death of a species could throw off the food chain and lead to drastic consequences. Yet, this is not always the case. In fact, the impact of different animal species on their environment differs across the board. For example, the snail darter, a type of fish, is one that could easily be replaced by another type of fish (Bradley, 2001). Does this mean that the snail darter holds no value?  Perhaps it has aesthetic value, or maybe there is some value to biodiversity. However, if we hold that we should protect endangered species because of their aesthetic value, we are taking an anthropocentric view of the value animals, and some philosophers take issue with that. If we value species for their contribution to biodiversity, that still does not answer why biodiversity is important. There is also contributory value, of course, which is akin to the food chain metaphor. Perhaps species have value because they contribute to their environment, but does this mean that animals that are not needed are not valuable? Finally, there is the idea of intrinsic value. Maybe animals have a value of their own. However, when it comes to preserving an endangered species, sometimes the practices used harm the individuals of the species. Finally, if there is indeed a value to protecting endangered species, there is also the question of how to go about it. Trying to save one species may very well put another species at risk because, ultimately, we cannot predict every possible outcome of the complex web of nature. Then there is the question of how to go about protecting species, and whether conservation can be conducted in an ethical manner. I plan to explore the value of endangered species in relation to humans, to nature, and out of their own intrinsic worth. Furthermore, I want to examine the ethics of protecting a species through conservation, and how all of these issues come to a head in specific cases, like that of the polar bear.

Before considering the value of protecting animal species, one must consider what cases, if any, merit protection of an endangered species. Humans certainly have an impact on the extinction of animals, through things like deforestation, climate change, and desertification (Keulartz, 2015). However, animals also go extinct through natural selection on their own. For example, natural selection sometimes occurs due to a surplus of predators or some other competing species. Even, in the case of animals who become endangered due to human interactions with the environment, there is still debate on whether or not intervention should be taken at all. After all, humans are animals whose growth occasionally coincides with the extinction of another species, which would seem to be a natural process (Michael, 2005).  Mark Michael argues that the use of the word natural to describe behavior should be completely done away with when it comes to the theoretical framework for and against protecting the environment because it is too ambiguous and has no set definition. The idea of “acting naturally” can mean many things, including behaving how one does in their specific community, under a specific set of beliefs, due to their environment or biology, etc. Basically, acting naturally encompasses all of human behaviors, and to propose that behaving naturally is moral would mean that everything we do is moral because we are always following our natures, in one way or another. Regardless, even if one specifies that acting naturally is moral when it is driven by a need for flourishing of one’s species, Michael says that driving a species toward extinction can actually work against humans. After all, it is in the best interest of humans to have a healthy environment, and so it would seem that it is more natural to preserve species. The ambiguity of the claim that we ought to follow our natures, Michael says, is unnecessary for both sides of the argument, when what we really should be saying is either that there is some value to nature that we ought to preserve. This is where the argument moves toward what exactly the value is.

The first case to be made for endangered species is their value for humankind. Robert Goodin (1999) notes that an anthropocentric view of preserving nature is not necessarily a bad thing, as species are typically concerned with the preservation of their own first, and from that stems concern for a sustainable healthy environment. He uses fisheries, for example, which concern themselves with the maximum sustainable yield fish so that their practices can continue. It would not be in the fisheries’ best interest to overfish, even if it had an immediate positive outcome, because it would destroy the industry’s future. He further details the desire for sustainable future as one that errs on the side of caution. Receiving a large profit immediately that may not last forever is less desirable than a steady, reliable, income that would allow one to continue their lifestyle indefinitely. Goodin also notes that a desire to protect species is not only good for individuals, in a self-centered manner, but also for the protection of humans and future generations. While some argue that it is unfair to expect the current generation to consume to a lesser extent than previous generations, Goodin argues that what has already occurred should hold no bearing in what we do for our future generations. After all, as time passes our opinions about the environment change, our population fluctuates, and our knowledge about the effects of our practices increases. We cannot change what happened in the past, but he says that, if we assume it is our duty to ensure a fair lifestyle for future generations, we should not let the past define our future. Yet there is still the question of why we should ensure such a future for later generations. After all, there can be no reciprocity. Goodin cites David Hume, saying that despite the lack of reciprocity, we have a duty to protect the vulnerable, as the future generations’ lives are dependent upon what we do now and they have no ability to change the hand that they are given. While future generations cannot give back to us, they also have no ability to defend themselves against the choices we make. This asymmetry, he says, suggests that self-centered actions need to have a limit. He cites Rousseau’s call for promotion of the common good, meaning that individuals should not think only of their own benefits, but the benefits for others as well. Consider Kant’s categorical imperative, in this instance. If we decided that we should not consider sustainability, in favor of our own flourishing, we would be abusing our position of power over those who cannot defend themselves. If this behavior was applied universally, all those in a position of power would abuse that power and those who could not defend themselves would be systematically disadvantaged. Now this argument for sustainability assumes, of course, that the protection of endangered species is important only in that the species provides benefits for humans. However, like in the case of the snail darter, not all species have an obvious value for human use.

Ben Bradley (2001) considers the value of species outside of their instrumental value. This issue comes down to preservation versus conservation, where a preservationist would assume that endangered species have some inherent value even if they are of no obvious use to humans. Bradley says that preservationists face a problem in trying to argue for the value of a species because they assume that intrinsic value and instrumental value are the only ways to argue for the protection of species. He presents a third type, which is contributory value. This value is different from intrinsic value, in that it suggests that species value is not necessarily innate. However, it is not instrumental value, because it does not rely upon a species causal relationships with other things. Bradley explains the contributory value assumes that a species, while it may seem unuseful or ugly on its own, has value in that it makes the whole of the environment more beautiful because of its relation to the different parts of the environment. It is not that the species is important because of what it does to other parts of the environment, but because what it does changes our conception of the whole. Bradley uses the example of two exactly alike paintings and a piece of music. While it would seem that that paintings and the music all have the same intrinsic value, one could argue that the combination of one of the paintings and piece of music has more value than the combination of both of the alike paintings. This, he says, makes the case for a value in variety, in that variety contributes to the conception of the whole. Extending this to endangered species, Bradley says that the last few animals of an endangered species have more contributory value than the animals of a species that is not endangered because if one were to kill those last animals, the variety of animal species would be decreased, thus altering our perception of the whole. He further specifies that contributory value explains why we would find it less morally good to eliminate the last reptiles than simply eliminating the last alligators. Alligators share traits with other reptiles, while reptiles do not share as many traits with other groups of animals. Eliminating the last reptiles decreases the variety of the environment much more than eliminating just one specific animal species.

Oscar Horta (2010) argues that an anthropocentric view of a species value is, in fact, speciesist and therefore immoral. Speciesism is defined as the unjust treatment of animals that are not considered to be a part of one’s own species, and in particular the exploitation of animals outside of one’s species. However, Horta notes that this definition is fluid and often debated. The key point is not that all species should be treated in exactly the same way, but that animals should not be treated disadvantageously because of their species. Horta also notes that, despite its name, speciesism does not necessarily mean disadvantaging the species as whole, but rather treating the individual animals in an unjust way, even if for the good of the species. Consider contributory value, for example. Contributory value certainly makes the case for protecting a species based on its value to the whole, but it does not say much for the individual animals themselves. Horta cites the culling of ruddy ducks, which is a practice that has been defended for the sake of protecting another endangered species of duck. This practice could be defended if one thinks that the endangered species of duck have a higher contributory value than the ruddy duck. Perhaps then, we should consider both the contributory value of the species, and our treatment of the individual members of a species. Perhaps it would be for the best to slaughter ruddy ducks to save an endangered species, but it is a practice which places the individual animals of the ruddy duck species at a disadvantage, and it is certainly not a necessary practice. Perhaps a compromise could be made; for example, the endangered duck species is placed in captivity and bred so as the preserve the species without harming the individuals of another species.

The case for the value of species is ambiguous, but with compromise, and considering the different values that a species may have, it would seem like preserving endangered animals is the morally right thing to do. However, there is still the matter of when it is the morally right thing to do. As mentioned before, animal species go extinct due to natural selection, and in some cases it would appear that preserving a species is actually not in the best interest of the environment, or for the individuals of another species. Nancy Sturman (2013) mention the proposal to exterminate animals that the endangered speartooth shark does not eat to help preserve the species. Not only does this proposal present moral issues, but there is also doubt about whether the extermination would actually help. The consequences are unpredictable, and the measure of the possible benefits against those consequences are equally as unpredictable. After all, at what point do environmentalists decide that there are enough of the endangered shark species in specific locations? Sturman concludes by saying that these issues do not suggest that saving endangered species is wrong; after all, it is always best to avoid suffering when possible and as discussed previously, preserving diversity in nature would appear to be the morally good thing to do. Rather, these are issues that must be considered when making plans to help endangered species.

Keeping the value of species and the complications of preserving a species in mind, there remains the question of finding a solution that works to protect endangered species whilst promoting the individual well being of animals. One suggested way of doing this is by placing animals in captivity, such as in a zoo. The ethics of captivity are debated and yet with the increasing movement of animals due to global practices, the option of keeping animals in their native areas is becoming more difficult to implement, especially in cases where the animals’ habitats are affected by processes like climate change, for instance (Keulartz, 2015). Josef Keulartz considers the ethical implications of captivity for conservation and the balance between species conservation and animal welfare that zoos must consider when using this method to protect endangered species. He says that one problem that conservationists face is actually relocating animals, which can bring on  stress and lead to an unlikelihood of the individuals in the species becoming self-sustaining. The ethics of captivity for the species boils down to the argument between those who consider the species more important than the individual animal and those who consider the individual animal more important than the species. As mentioned earlier by Oscar Horta (2010), it is argued that it is speciesist to treat an individual animal disadvantageously even if that treatment could result in beneficial outcomes for the species as whole. Keulartz cites the utilitarian Peter Singer, who says that if a species were endangered and could be safely captured, set in the same conditions that they would be in the wild, and then released, captivity for conservation would be ethical. However, he also says that this is not usually the case. Keulartz also notes that other ethicists hold similar and even stronger views than Singer, such as that captivity infringes upon an animal’s right to liberty and that it could only be justified if the benefits could be proven to outweigh the consequences of infringing upon this right. Then there’s the fact that zoos themselves do not exist solely for endangered animals and, in fact, breeding programs are not widespread, are not very effective, and also have low chances of reintroducing the animals into the wild. Keulartz presents possible solutions for these ethical and practical issues. For instance, he says that animals should be introduced to environments which closely mimic their natural environment, while taking into consideration the limits. For instance, Keulartz says that it is difficult to have predators feed in the same way that they would in the wild, as the sight of an animal ripping another apart is not one that visitors would typically like to see.  Practically, he suggests that zoos contribute more of their funds to conservation, as current estimates place the contribution to be less than 5% of zoos incomes. Keulartz also suggests a link between zoos with similar conservation goals in mind, so that visitors at each zoo can learn about the conservation efforts of another zoo whilst simultaneously viewing the work done by the zoo that they’re at, thus providing more education for the public. Informing the public, raising money, donating funds, and increasing the quality of these animals’ habits are practical efforts, but they would also aid in increasing the quality of life for the animals by allowing for more spacious and naturalistic habitats and for better efforts at breeding and releasing animals back into the wild. Although these suggestions aren’t necessarily a solution for the rift between those who argue that captivity is speciesism and those who argue that captivity for conservation is for the good of the species and is moral, it does show how captivity and conservation efforts can be amended so that the individual animals’ right and the species’ rights are equally considered.

Now that the ethical debate has been broadly explained, perhaps we should consider the problem in the context of a specific situation. One case of a species that has been listed as threatened and that may need human intervention to protect it is the polar bear (Palmer, 2009). The issue with this species is that the melting of arctic ice is linked to climate change, a topic that is still controversial and doesn’t have any easily implementable solution. Clare Palmer begins by discussing why we should care about the possible extinction of the polar bear. Not only is the species culturally significant to native people, but its extinction could have an impact on the ecosystem it comes from. However, as mentioned earlier, weighing the costs and benefits of a species extinction is a gray area that doesn’t say much about the species’ actual value. Rather than focusing on the polar bear’s instrumental value, Palmer claims that the polar bear has moral status. Yet, she notes that arguing for the value of individual animals and species as victims of another species is tricky because one has to balance the rights of the individuals with the rights of the group. Clare considers Lawrence Johnson’s argument that animals are indeed individuals worthy of moral consideration. The first argument of his that she presents is that animals should be considered as individuals because the individuals of the species may have interests that lie outside of the species’ interests. Furthermore, she discusses mentions his argument that although animals may not be aware of morality, awareness is not necessary for an animal to merit moral status, in the same way that a human being who is not aware that they have been wronged would still have a right to not be wronged. These arguments further evidence that animals should be considered as individuals that merit protection. Unlike Oscar Horta (2010) who proposed that harming an individual animal, even for the good of the species, could be considered speciesist, Palmer argues that not protecting a species is actually committing harm to the group. Palmer also says that, while it is still debated as to whether a group can have more or different rights from its individuals, it is typically agreed that groups can be harmed. In this case, it would almost seem like either way rights would be violated. If we assume that climate change is a result of human behaviors, then the consequences to the polar bear species if we choose to do nothing is a harm against the group. Although undesirable for the individual animals, perhaps, until we can figure out some solution for the destruction of the polar bear’s habitat and climate change, it is best to avoid harming the group by taking them into captivity, in the manner that Keulartz suggested. Although this may cause harm to the individual, there is a fine line that must be balanced between consideration for the harm we cause a species and the harm of the individual animals.

Ethical considerations for protecting endangered species are still widely varied and debated. For instance, considering endangered animals as individuals or as a species only presents various issues. If we consider them only as individuals we risk losing biodiversity and systematically harming groups of animals. If  we consider them only as a species we risk doing harm to the individuals or violating their rights. If we look at things only from an anthropocentric view and what our future generations could stand to lose, we lose sight of the moral status of the animals themselves. Ultimately, it would appear that conservation efforts need to improve in ways that cause less stress to animals, that provide better education and funding, and that make it easier to reintroduce animals to the environment (Keulartz, 2015). If steps toward this goal are taken, the gap between animal preservationists and conservationists might not be completely bridged, but we can work toward better treatment of both individual animal groups and species.

References

Bradley, B. (2001). The Value of Endangered Species. The Journal of Value Inquiry, 35, 43-58.

doi:10.1023/A:1010383322591

Cohen, S. (2014). The Ethics of De-Extinction. NanoEthics, 8, 165-178.

doi:10.1007/s11569-014-0201-2

Goodin, R. E. (1999). The Sustainability Ethic: Political, Not Just Moral. Journal of Applied

Philosophy, 16, 247-254. doi:10.1111/1468-5930.00127

Johnson, L. (2009).(Singer, EE, 98).

Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics and Public Policy, 23, 587-603.

Keulartz, J. (2015). Captivity for Conservation? Zoos at a Crossroads. Journal of Agricultural

and Environmental Ethics, 28, 335-351. doi:10.1007/s10806-015-9537-z

Horta, O. (2010). What is Speciesism? Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, 23,

243-266. doi:10.1007/s10806-009-9205-2

Michael, M. A. (2005). Is It Natural To Drive Species To Extinction? Ethics & the

Environment, 10, 49-66. doi:10.2979/ete.2005.10.1.49

Sturman, N. (2013). Many Hurdles for the Translation of Species Preservation Research:

Comment on 'Ethics of Species Research and Preservation' by Rob Irvine. Journal of

Bioethical Inquiry, 10, 531-532. doi:10.1007/s11673-013-9472-5

[nonamememoir]

Making Waves by Tori Bloom

A sky absent of gray soared over our heads while we walked around the park. It had been pouring for the past week, but there was finally sunshine and warmth shining down. Still, there were signs of the rain in the puddles on the blacktop and the roaring creek, filled to the edges and spilling onto the grass. My older sister Amber and I walked across the metal bridge and stopped, listening to the crash of waves and peering into the muddy water underneath us. We were taking a walk and reuniting with the summer air. It had been my suggestion, as a toddler who could only spend so much time inside before becoming antsy and full of energy. I squeezed the rubber ball in my hand and my sister began walking again, satisfied with her time spent watching the creek, and I followed. I bounced the ball on the road as soon as we were off the bridge, seeing how high it could go and grinning delightedly. My sister was a few steps ahead of me. I bounced the ball again and it veered to the left, plopping into a muddy puddle. I waddled over with my stubby legs and reached into the puddle, but I lost my footing and slipped in. The puddle, inconspicuous and unalarming, had swallowed me up. What I had thought was maybe only an inch or two deep, was actually a deep hole that had flooded with rainwater.

I wasn’t able to process what was happening as I plummeted into the water. My hands flailed up and I pushed my head out of the top of the water, taking a gasping breath before plunging back in. The walls were slick mud, and any attempt to grasp the surface was doomed. I opened my eyes but I couldn’t see anything but thick brown. My feet hit the bottom of the hole and I kicked myself up, but not far enough to breach the surface again. I wanted to scream myself hoarse, but I couldn’t. Panic consumed me and I was hopeless. A moment later I felt yanking, and I was being pulled up out of the heavy water. My sister had seen the bubbles on the surface of the water as I thrashed around but later told me she might have dismissed them if it weren’t for my hair, fire red against the brown water, floating up. She gripped my hair and pulled me up by the top of my head. I laid on the grass, my baby blue shirt stained brown and face covered in mud, and sobbed. She had saved me, and all I could think about was how upset I was that my favorite shirt had been ruined. That’s how children are, though. I wasn’t able to process the gravity of the situation that I had just been in, or how easily I might have been found floating in that hole, lifeless and blue-lipped.

As a child I was incapable of saving myself, but that didn’t necessarily change as I got older. I learned how to swim, how to pull myself up out of the depths, but as I changed the world added weights to my ankles. I was born with depression, showing symptoms for as long as I can remember, and it was nurtured into full-fledged self-hatred, abandonment issues, and an avoidant personality. Sometimes I let myself plunge to the bottom, sometimes I saved myself, and other times I needed someone to pull me back up. Unfortunately, depression isn’t as simple as being saved from a near-drowning, taking a few deep breaths of air, and moving on. Instead, it’s like bobbing in an ocean, working endlessly to pull myself above the waves to take a quick breath, only to be pulled back under and kicked around by the ruthless current, all the while watching my loved ones lounging on the shore and breathing just fine.

Before my mother left me I had been living with her for my entire life. Even when she and my dad broke up and he moved to Kentucky, I stayed behind and lived with her. At that time in our lives, we didn’t have one home but multiple. At one point we had lived with my mom’s friend Dottie in a tiny yellow house. There was a chain link fence around the backyard and a swingset for me to occupy myself, as I wasn’t allowed to walk around the neighborhood. Dottie didn’t have any guest bedrooms, so my mom and I slept on an air mattress on the floor in the empty living room. The only other thing in that room was our computer, sitting in the corner on the floor. We didn’t have internet, and our only television was a tiny archaic thing sitting in the kitchen, so I contented myself by playing “Rollercoaster Tycoon 2” on that computer after school. I was lucky enough that I was able to stay in the same school that I had been going to for the past two years, our address still listed as my grandparents’ house and my mom willing to drive me to school every day.

One morning my mom shook me awake from my place on the air mattress, a grin stretching across her face. “Tori, wake up! I’ve got something to show you!”

I groaned and pulled my pillow over my head. “What time is it?”

“It’s 6:30, c’mon.”

“I still have a half hour!”

After a few more protests she managed to get me out of bed. I followed her up the yellowing stairs and she led me into Dottie’s room. It was small and messy and, on the middle of the floor in the center of the clutter, Dottie’s dog was laying on a blanket, soiled with blood and water. A few wet puppies were cuddled up to their mother, their eyes not yet open as they nudged against her belly and squeaked. She nuzzled one of the puppies near her and licked it clean. I watched in awe from the doorway and my mom brought one of the puppies over to me, letting me pet it. It was a blue pitbull, with soft fur and wrinkled skin. Unfortunately, I had to get ready for school, but my mom promised that I could see the puppies again when I got home. I don’t remember much from my time at Dottie’s, but I remember those puppies. A few weeks passed and we prepared to move out of Dottie’s house and in with my aunt Julie. It was just too difficult for my mom to drive me to school from Dottie’s house, and with the puppies around there soon wouldn’t be enough room for us.

My aunt Julie’s house was another bandaid over a bullet hole, a rest stop for two hitchhikers. Sometimes my mom would sit with me on our bed in the basement and cry, guilt consuming her from having to rely on other people to feed us and keep us warm. There were no jobs in Daisytown, or anywhere outside of Pittsburgh. My mom finally decided that her only option was to leave me with my aunt Julie and move to Harrisburg until she had the money to take care of us both. She told me that it would only be a few weeks, but weeks turned into months. My aunt Julie was sick, the circulation in her leg at a standstill. Her calf was turning black and her mind was hazy from the pills she popped in her mouth. When I came home from school I did all of the chores that she asked me to, and in return I was allowed to sleep in the master bedroom. It was a nice exchange for me as the basement I had been sleeping in got cold in the winter, and it was lonely down there with my mother no longer around. Aunt Julie became increasingly ill, sweating out a fever on the floral couch cushions and unable to move to the master bedroom even if she wanted to.

After months of pushing back waves of pain with pills, Aunt Julie had to be hospitalized and my aunt Chris was called to come pick me up. I didn’t know at the time that I would end up living with her for a few years, so I packed my things just for the weekend and we drove off. We paid a visit to my grandparents’ on our way to her house, and I slipped into the guest bedroom to use the computer and check my Myspace account. My aunt Julie didn’t have internet, so I had to get my social media fix elsewhere. The internet was an escape for me, but it was a rarity anymore. When I logged onto my profile the first thing that popped up on my screen was a photo of my mother and my older sister’s ex-boyfriend, Erik, standing side by side. He had his arm wrapped around her waist. In the caption she said that they were just married. My mother had only been gone for a few months, less than half of a year. I hadn’t even known that she was dating Erik, let alone in love with him. My parents had dated for 15 years and they had never married. Yet, there she was on my computer screen, wearing a long skirt and leaning into her new husband’s touch. My eyes began to sting and water poured down my cheeks. With heaving shoulders, my head fell limp onto my arms and I hid my face. My stomach sank and my heart followed. There was a knock on the door and I lifted my head just as my aunt Chris walked in.

“Oh sweetie.” She walked over to me and looked at the photo on my screen, letting out a sigh.

“Did you know she got married?” I asked as I sat up straight and sniffled.

“Yeah.”

“She didn’t call. She didn’t even invite me to the wedding.”

“I don’t think she had a wedding. Amber said they eloped at city hall.”

“Well she could have called me! I knew Erik was visiting but, really?”

“I know. It’s ridiculous. But you know her, she doesn’t think about anyone but herself.”

I had become used to my other family members saying awful things about my mother. I had overheard my aunt Julie gossiping on the phone a few times, shaming my mother for abandoning me. In their own way they were standing up for me, protecting me from blaming myself. For awhile, it worked. My relationship with my mother became strained. She moved to the Netherlands with her husband, as he was born and raised there. We talked on Skype occasionally. The first time we did so she told me that she was pregnant. She said that she wanted me to visit her and Erik in Holland, and that she wished she could have brought me with her. She said that leaving me behind had left a hole in her heart that nothing could replace. Then we ended the Skype call, and I went back to living life without her. I distanced myself from her and all of those months that we had spent together, hopping from house to house.

Finally sober, my dad took me in and we settled into a house in New Oxford. It was the first time in five years that I had a home. I became close to my dad, and my mother’s betrayal became a distant memory. It wasn’t until my dad relapsed for the first time that I realized the depth of the pain I was still holding on to.

When my dad drank, he spiraled fast. The breaking point for us was when Teri hid my dad’s credit card in the car and locked the doors, so that he couldn’t buy more alcohol with money that we didn’t have and he couldn’t drive drunk. I peeked my head out of my bedroom door when I heard their shouting, my dad demanding to know where his card was. She broke down and told him that it was in the car, so he grabbed a shovel and threatened to break the windows if she didn’t unlock the doors. I hadn’t realized it until then, but my dad had become my anchor. He was the home that I had needed for years when my mom wasn’t there for me and I didn’t have anywhere that I belonged. Seeing him like that shattered me, pieces of me falling in the form of tears. Until that night I had been breathing just fine, but like all of those years ago when I almost drowned, what I thought was a puddle turned out to be a pit filled with water. It just took a long time for me to realize that I was slowly sinking toward the bottom.

I could forgive my father’s drinking. That had existed long before I was born, and for reasons I was able to understand to some extent. He had depression and anxiety, just like me. He was dealing with his own flood of problems. My mother’s betrayal, however, I couldn’t comprehend, so I began to write about it. While my dad was in rehab, I wrote poems and prose in my diary. My mother became my muse, and through writing about her my understanding of her changed. That she, like me, was human. That someone had hurt her. That she thought she was doing the right thing, the only thing. It wasn’t enough, but the least that I could do was visit her and try to rebuild what we once had.

Gray clouds were hiding the sun as my feet moved over the cold sand. I was wearing my bikini bottoms and a blue t-shirt as I stepped into the water. I grabbed my little sister, now two years old, and held her to my chest as I walked out into the crashing waves. My thighs were decorated in goosebumps and my hair was whipping in the wind. My mom stood on the shore with a camera, snapping photos as mementos of my time spent in Holland and with my little sister who would grow up too soon, without me. I set my sister down next to me and bent over laughing when her tiny hand splashed water against my calves. She waddled back to the shore, her curls bouncing and swaying in the wind, and I stayed, smiling for the camera from my place in the water. The shore lapped at my ankles and the sand sunk from underneath my feet while my mom stood on the shore next to her husband and child, keeping my memory in the waves.

[nonamememoir]

Religion, Pathology, or Symbolic Interaction? A Personal Narrative on the Role of Fandom in Identity by Tori Bloom

In 2014 I created my Youtube channel, toritalkstoomuch. Four years later, the channel has 423 subscribers and a total of over 400,000 views. I started this channel with the purpose of creating and sharing fan videos— videos that are inspired by some original source material. The videos on my channel, for example, mostly consist of edited clips from television shows. I also run several blogs where I share artwork, posts, videos, and works of fiction by myself and other fans, and I have a fanfiction account where I create and share stories about the characters in the shows that I enjoy. These are content communities, places where people can share their work with others, and they have become especially important in the production of fan culture (Campbell, Martin, & Fabos, 2017: 45). Television has become a source of creative energy for me and many others in online fandoms. However, it would be an oversimplification to say that fandoms are merely creative outlets. Through my personal involvement in fan culture, I have realized the influence that television shows and fandoms have on one’s sense of self, whether that be for good or bad. Through self-analysis and with the support of several scholarly sources, I intend to examine how television shows and the fandoms surrounding them create their own worlds. I will examine the idea that fandom is religion, and ultimately suggest that this idea is lacking. In order to properly understand fandom, I will look at my involvement with the television show Supernatural and its fandom, and I will analyze this relationship in light of Herbert Blumer’s (2005) theory of symbolic interactionism. This, I argue, is how television shows and fandoms shape the individual, not by acting as a religion but as a point of reference for a fan’s identity.

I created my first fandom-centric blog, on the website Tumblr, in 2012. It wasn’t until 2013, however, that I became involved with television show fandoms. The first television show fandom that I became involved, and perhaps the most influential fandom for me, was the one surrounding the show Supernatural. This show is about two brothers, Sam and Dean Winchester, who travel around the United States fighting and killing monsters, demons, angels, and other supernatural creatures. Despite the show’s roots in fantasy, the themes of love, family, self-acceptance, and perseverance that this show explores are integral to its following. Supernatural, like many television dramas, serves as a mirror of its intended audiences values, fears, and hopes (Campbell, Martin, & Fabos, 2017: 190). Personally, as a young teen coping with mental illness, anxiety, and my impending high school graduation, I was drawn to the character Dean Winchester because I saw myself in him. Dean is a character that has a low opinion of himself and shows disregard for his own well-being. However, he perseveres with the support of his family and by finding happiness in saving other people. I have often found, when I am sad or lonely, that watching an episode of Supernatural or a Youtube video about Dean helps me feel better because I feel as though I am in the company of a friend, or family. This phenomenon is not exclusive to me, however, but is a part of the way that fandom functions. Television shows create their own worlds and the fandom becomes a part of that world. Michael Jindra (1994) notes in his analysis of the Star Trek fandom that the show relies upon the myth of utopia as an achievable future to maintain its following. In short, it gives people hope. Supernatural relies on its own myths.

Supernatural is founded in several myths that maintain and shape its following, and at the core of these myths is the idea that fans are capable of changing the world or, at the very least, their world. This theme is perpetuated through its plot lines, firstly. Sam and Dean manage to stop the apocalypse, come back from death, face the devil, and more. They don’t do this alone, however. In fact, one of the plot lines revolves around a prophet writing books about them and selling them. The books gain a following and a fandom, and the fans in the show often assist the brothers in their goals. Even within the show, the fans are made to feel like they are a part of the Supernatural world, a clear wink and nod to the fans of the show. Outside of the show, the Supernatural fandom is often referred to by fans and the creators of the show as the Supernatural (SPN) Family, inspired by a quote from the show, Family don’t end with blood”. This phrase creates a connection between fans, and creates the illusion that the actors, for instance, are family. Another example is the Supernatural Hot Topic merchandise line called “Join the Hunt”. This phrase is used to make fans feel as though they are literally joining these characters, or the stars of the show, in their journey. This relates to our discussion of media friends in class on January 25th. My personal interactions with the actors are indicative of the concept of media friends. In several of my tweets from 2013 and later I address the actors as if they are friends, responding to their tweets with my thoughts on the latest episode or telling them that I was voting for the show in an award contest. At one point, one of the actors of a minor character in the show liked a tweet of mine and I immediately screenshotted it and shared it with my real friends, excited to have been noticed. Although the sense of family can be inspiring, the truth is that most fans aren’t actually close with the actors. When, when a fan like myself receives attention from a celebrity their place in the fandom world is validated. The myths perpetuated by the television show, and by the fans in the fandom, become real because at the time, that single like on my tweet made me feel like a part of the family.

Fans are also integral in creating the symbolic world that fandom exists in. Some of the literature on fandoms, and the fans within them, suggest that fandoms are a religious phenomenon, with a set of beliefs, origin myths, rituals, and institutions (Jinra, 1994). Jinra notes that some fans within the Star Trek fandom have married other fans and passed on their love of Star Trek to their children, much like a family might pass on their religious values. Jinra also doesn’t seem to be implying that the Star Trek fandom, as a religion, is necessarily unhealthy. In fact, he says that this is a stigma associated with fandom, much in the same way that religion faces stigma for producing overzealous followers. Supernatural incorporates biblical symbolism into the show as one of its core aspects. The angel, Castiel, was introduced in season 4 and his journey since then has been about his battle between his love for humanity and his sense of duty to God and heaven. Supernatural humanizes the heavenly. The show depicts God as an absentee father figure, Lucifer as a dejected son, and humanity as God’s project. Yet, despite the show’s religious themes, I would argue that labelling the SPN family, and other fandoms, as religious is a misrepresentation of fan culture. On the one hand, I have seen fans worship the actors and characters almost like religious deities. For example, Misha Collins, Castiel’s actor, refers to his fans as his “minions”. There are shared beliefs among fans, much like a religion, such as the idea that family transcends blood ties and that sometimes doing the right thing means abandoning one’s duty. Some Supernatural fans have married within the fandom, like the Star Trek fandom, and they raise their kids to be fans as well. Based on my experience, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that it is not just the Star Trek fandom that produces a quasi-religious following. However, I argue that the term religion is too broad to describe a fandom, and that it implies that there is some fundamental difference between fandom and more acceptable interests.

Joli Jensen (1992) attempts to fight the stigma that fandom regularly produces pathologically obsessed fans who are depraved, amoral, and animalistic. In particular, Jensen questions the dichotomy between high culture aficionados and fandoms. This is not to say that overzealous fans do not exist, but as Jensen notes, this is not indicative of a flawed tendency of fandom to create radical followers. The tendency to see fanaticism as pathology, she argues, comes from the distinction between high culture and common culture. This relates to our class discussion on January 25th, about nonelite culture, the culture of the masses, especially involving leisure and mass media. Those who are interested in high culture objects of desire, like paintings rather than posters, or a scholarly journal over tabloid magazines, are considered aficionados. Fan culture, in its association with the middle class, is deemed to be the product of inept psychological health. That is, the characters, stories, and celebrities are seen as a replacement for healthy, real, relationships. The fan, as opposed to the aficionado, is considered to be rowdy and has a tendency for excess. Jenson asks why society doesn’t typically associate pathology with, for example, professors and their loyalties to specific disciplines, antique collectors, opera buffs, or gardeners. She believes the division between the aficionado and the fan is an assumed dichotomy between the rational and the emotional. Reason is desirable and praised, and high culture is associated with it. Lower classes, on the other hand, are associated with emotion. Yet, aficionados share the same, or similar behaviors as fans, often displaying emotional attachment to their interests. She uses herself as an example, stating that her academic papers and reviews are not much different from fan letters, and that she collects memorabilia from people who are considered part of elite culture, like Patsy Cline, William Morris, William James, etc. Ultimately, she says that the difference is that fandom is associated with the less wealthy, the less educated, the deviant, the common, and the irrational. n Jensen’s opinion, the distinction between high culture and nonelite culture is arbitrary and that “aficionado-hood” is fandom in disguise. This, I would argue is a point of criticism for Jinra’s (1994) suggestion that fandom is religion. The practices of a fandom are comparable to religion in the same way that high culture is. We could refer to all avid interest as religious, but then the term would be too broad and would lose its meaning. I suggest, based on this critique as well as my own experiences, that fandom is a world of symbolic meaning that is shared between individuals.

Herbert Blumer (2005) defines symbolic interactionism as the fact that humans interpret each other’s actions and give meaning to them, as well as the objects around them. Through symbolic interaction, we come to understand ourselves, what is important to us and others, and how we fit into the world. According to this theory, objects do not have inherent meaning; instead, their meaning is interpreted by individuals based on their interaction with others in society. Fandoms, I suggest, are niche communities, scaled-down societies, with objects that have meanings which are unique to that community. For example, the main characters of Supernatural drive a 1967 Chevy Impala, which is a family car that was passed down from Dean Winchester’s father to him. The car itself is an object without meaning, but in the show it represents family, rebirth, and freedom. Sam and Dean have lost a lot of family in the show, including their father, mother, and close friends, but the Impala has been a constant in their lives. Because of this, the car has become an important symbol to the fans. Another example of an important symbol in the show is the anti-possession symbol. This is a tattoo that the brothers both have. It is a pentagram in the middle of what looks like flames. The pentagram has meaning in the Wiccan faith, but in Supernatural the original meaning is altered. The anti-possession symbol represents imperviousness to evil, much like the original pentagram, and also a family bond. I myself have a t-shirt with the Impala printed on it, as well as a backpack and a pair of sweatpants with the anti-possession symbol on them. These objects are full of meaning for the fandom not because the show gives them meaning but because those who watch the show interact with others, see the importance that these objects have for other fans, and interpret the meaning that the symbols have for themselves. The spreading of symbolic meaning is related to content communities in particular. For example, I have several Youtube videos on my channel that explore Dean Winchester’s symptoms of depression. Each video has hundreds of views, representing other fans who have watched my videos and have seen my interpretation of Dean as a character with a mental illness. I interpreted his actions this way with reference to my own mental health battles, as well as through my experiences with other fans with mental illness who identified with Dean. The fans who watch my videos are exposed to how I, and many others, react to and interpret Dean’s character and then they either choose to believe that Dean has depression or they interpret him differently. All fans are not alike, simply adopting the social meanings that have already been assigned to these symbols by other fans. Blumer says that despite the repetitive behavior of people in a given society that does not mean that interpretation is not occurring. In fact, the only reason people act in specific ways in situations, or think certain objects have a specific meaning to them, is because they interpret them that way. Furthermore, there are many situations that do not have an agreed upon social meaning, and in those cases the actions of people might not align.

The premise of Supernatural, was not what initially interested me in the show. I was introduced to the show by other fans who had blogs which I followed. Supernatural was a part of the online social groups that I was involved in, particularly because my online friends were involved with something called shipping. The word ship, in this context, is short for relationship, and it is a verb used by fans to describe the fact that they wish that two characters would be in a relationship with each other. In the show Supernatural the most popular ship is between Dean Winchester and a male angel named Castiel. The ship is commonly referred to as Destiel. This ship is a subculture of the SPN family. Through this subculture I became more aware of the effects of television representation on the real world. Besides writing fiction, fandoms often write analyses of the television show, either to predict what will happen in future episodes, to point out troubling stereotypes and tropes within the show, or to explain their interpretations of the episode. Thanks to the analyses of Destiel fans, I was introduced to the concept of queerbaiting. Queerbaiting is a term used to refer to a tactic used by producers of television and film to suggest a homoerotic relationship between two characters in order to draw attention but without the intention of ever legitimizing the relationship (Brennan, 2016). Analyzing and criticizing queerbaiting was a part of being a Destiel fan, something that differentiated us from the whole of the SPN family and which defined us as a group. We were critical of the techniques that the producers of the show used to maintain their following. Destiel fans have faced a lot of backlash from the SPN family, the producers, and there has even been disagreement within the subculture itself. Through my blog on the website Tumblr I was introduced to anti-Destiel fans. These fans are a part of the SPN family, usually, but they interpret Dean and Castiel’s on-screen relationship as strictly platonic and not an instance of queerbaiting. Within the Destiel subculture there is disagreement, with some wishing for the writers to introduce Destiel as a legitimized romantic relationship on the show and others arguing that, although they like the idea of the couple, a legitimized relationship would ruin the essence of the show, which is about family and, more specifically, the brothers. Despite the unique and often contradictory interpretations of the show, the SPN family comes together at times, sometimes enacting real social change.

The internet has given new power to social movements, and sometimes those movements begin, or are promoted by, fans. Although the movements that the SPN family has kickstarted are not quite as significant as, say, the Arab Spring, the internet and social media have been key in giving ordinary people the ability to start or become involved movements (Campbell, Martin, & Fabos, 2017: 263). In 2009, Misha Collins used his twitter account to ask fans for ideas for a charity. He ultimately co-founded a non-profit organization called Random Acts (n.d.), which is devoted to inspiring random acts of kindness across the world. Misha also began the Greatest International Scavenger Hunt the World Has Ever Seen (GISHWHES) as a way to gain support for Supernatural to win a People’s Choice Award, but it was also a means of getting people outside of their comfort zones (Miller, 2016). I have personally participated in this scavenger hunt because other fans who I considered friends asked me to join their team, and although the prize, a trip with Misha Collins, was desirable I competed just for fun. On the one hand, GISHWHES was originally a marketing scheme, much like we saw in the film Generation Like in class on March 27th. In that film, we saw how fans of The Hunger Games were encouraged to compete, and promote the show, in order to be labelled the number one fan of the series. However, GISHWHES was also about bringing fans together as teams and promoting the show’s values. In particular, the scavenger hunt’s strange tasks served as a reminder that it’s okay to be considered an outcast, or weird, because in the SPN family, you are accepted.

Fandoms are not just creative outlets, and they are not a place which necessarily cultivates pathology or acts as a religion. Based on my own personal narrative in my experiences with the SPN family, as well as the input of a few academic sources, I have suggested that fandoms epitomize Herbert Blumer’s (2005) theory of symbolic interactionism. The meanings behind certain symbols are interpreted by fans based on their interactions with others as well as what those symbols indicate to a person’s pre-existing sense of self. For me, Supernatural has encouraged my creative capacities because I believe in the values that the show, the actors, and the fans share. Fandom is diverse, and sometimes the show and its important symbols are interpreted differently by individuals. However, thanks to the internet and content communities, the shared meaning that fans find in a show can result in social change. Sometimes this social change is as simple as changing an individual, such as myself, and teaching them to become more critical of queer representation, and sometimes the social change is on a larger scale in the form of non-profit charities. Overall, fandoms are communities in which fans can view themselves in light of certain shared values. For Supernatural this shared value is, above all, the value of family.

Bibliography

Blumer, H. (2005). Society as Symbolic Interaction (S. P. Hier, Ed.). In Contemporary Sociological Thought: Themes and Theories(pp. 91-100). Canadian Scholars' Press.

Brennan, J. (2016). Queerbaiting: The ‘playful’ possibilities of homoeroticism. International Journal of Cultural Studies,21(2), 189-206. doi:10.1177/1367877916631050

Jensen, J. (1992). Fandom as Pathology: The Consequences of Characterization (L. A. Lewis, Ed.). In The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media(pp. 9-29). Routledge.

Jindra, M. (1994). Star Trek Fandom as a Religious Phenomenon. Sociology of Religion,55(1), 27-51. doi:10.2307/3712174

Miller, S. (2016). Rejoice! Misha Collins' Greatest International Scavenger Hunt the World Has Ever Seen is back. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/jul/29/misha-collins-greatest-international-scavenger-hunt-the-world-has-ever-seen

Random Acts. (n.d.). Our History. Retrieved from https://www.randomacts.org/history/

[nonamememoir]

Gun Violence in Schools: An Expression of Powerlessness in a Gendered World by Tori Bloom

Gun violence is a social and political issue with a vast, and often contradictory, pool of research and analyses. At first glance, the issue might seem unworthy of attention. Mass shootings and school shootings are rare when compared to other crimes. Since the 1980s, youth violence and school violence in the United States have declined. Juvenile gun violence has decreased since 1994 (Kimmel and Mahler 1441). However, the relative frequency of such incidents in the United States suggests that there is a problem that is worthy of attention. According to a study conducted by the Academy for Critical Incident Analysis at John Jay College, between the years 2000 and 2010 there were 57 school shootings around the world, and The United States accounted for 28 of them (Erikson). This issue is relevant both socially and politically when we delve into the reasons why the United States in particular is an outlier for school shootings. The conversation around gun violence has considered several factors in the making of a school shooter, such as mental health treatment, gun control, violence in the media, and parenting. However, the profile of the shooter is rarely considered. I will examine the importance of gender and race in the profile of school shooters in the context of R.W. Connell’s framework of hegemonic masculinity. Then, through an analysis of Hannah Arendt’s On Violence, I intend to argue that hegemonic masculinity as it exists in Western society is a structure that is set up to destroy itself, leaving everyone powerless. Following from this analysis, I will suggest that the solution to gun violence is a drastic reform of the state as well as an increase in gun control.

R.W. Connell describes gender as a collective phenomenon that is a part of social institutions created and maintained by the state, as well as an aspect of personal life (509). Connell presents gender relations not as a by-product of the state, but as a part of the continuous process of the state as system of institutions that has had, from the start, a location within gender relations (519). According to Connell, the state must be understood as a structure of power, a process, which persists and adapts over time. The fact that the state, in this conception, is a process suggests that it is not necessarily patriarchal, but that it is essentially patriarchal because of the history that shaped and continues to shape it (535). R.W. Connell’s theory of the state also challenges the views of liberal, socialist, and anarchist scholars who, even when they recognize the state as an agent of domination, tend to present the citizens of the state as unsexed (510). In particular Connell is concerned with the state as an organizer of gendered power relations which, through laws and institutions, sets up a hierarchy of masculinities (520). Therefore, as a more complete theory of the state, hegemonic masculinity will serve as the framework for my analyses of school violence.

Out of this feminist theory of the state comes the concept of hegemonic masculinity, a hierarchy of masculinities as a pattern which allows men to subordinate the feminine as well as other “lesser” forms of masculinity (Connell and Messerschmidt 831-832). Hegemonic masculinity, according to Connell and James Messerschmidt, is the idea that there is a hierarchy of masculinities, in which some masculinities are considered more ideal than others and are used to suppress and subordinate lesser forms of masculinity (831). This suggests that masculinity is not just one homogenous thing, In fact, research has documented local gender hierarchies and cultures of masculinities in schools, providing support for the idea of multiple masculinities and the fight for dominance (832). Through hegemonic masculinity, violence is legitimized and becomes connected to the idea of transformative power and brotherhood (Bernstein 19).

Feminist theory will allow me to examine school violence through an intersectional lense. In an article for Time Magazine, Jill Filipovic notes that white men are more likely to own guns, and white conservative men are more likely to have an arsenal of weapons than other groups. She argues that gun violence in the United States is not a matter of being isolated or mentally ill, but that it is actually the product of hyper-masculinity and pack mentality. Filipovic offers a perspective on gun violence that isolates the profile of the typical shooter, something which is lacking in many media analyses of shootings. However, my argument diverges from Filipovic’s because she does not consider school violence in particular. Filipovic argues that adult males participate in gun violence as a means of maintaining power in a world where they must increasingly compete in a global economy where they are no longer as important as they once were, as sole providers for their families. However, this argument does not adequately explain the existence of young male school shooters who share a common thread of being victims of bullying and abuse. Feminist theory has frequently suggested a relationship between masculinity and violence, but this relationship alone does not explain the existence of school shooters. Namely, it does not delve into the reasons why a particular type of masculinity is idolized among white men or the implications the use of violence has on exerting and maintaining power. Through my feminist analysis, I will argue that school shootings are the product of gender roles, isolation, and ultimately the desire to belong and to exert dominance

Mia Consalvo offers a feminist analysis of constructions of masculinity in the media. Her work will support my own feminist interpretation of school violence, especially in highlighting the inadequacies of different contemporary interpretations of school violence. Consalvo stresses that in discussions of how to prevent school violence, matters of race and gender are overlooked (28). The lack of attention to race, for instance, was an oversight in the case of the Columbine shooters, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris who were both noted to have severe hatred toward minorities (37). The profile of school shooters suggests that gender, race, and sexuality play a key role in the prevalence of such violence in the United States. Through feminist theory I will be able to provide evidence that the desire to dominate and commit acts of violence is not a matter of human nature, at least in a direct way. Rather, violence is the product of a human desire to belong to a powerful community and the reinforcement of masculine gender roles that praise acts of violence.

Kimmel and Mahler outline the several attempts which have been made to address the possible causes of youth gun violence. One of the main arguments made for the prevalence of gun violence in the United States is that kids’ exposure to graphic violence in the media undermines their resilience and self control. However, this would only make sense if youth violence was positively correlated with the recent increase in media violence, and it is not. Others suggest that youth violence is related to the availability of firearms. In contrast to this, some argue that there are not enough guns, particularly in the hands of school security guards. There have also been discussions around mental illness and its possible triggers, including a history of child abuse, absent fathers, a violent childhood, an unstable family environment, or mothers’ fear of their children (Kimmel and Mahler 1441). Kimmel and Mahler note, however, that almost all school shooters have come from relatively stable families, and their psychological problems, if any were present, were minor. The authors also point out one key flaw in this argument, and that is that these psychological variables would apply to both boys and girls. Ultimately, none of these arguments examine the fact that these shooters are almost always white men (1442).

Angela Stroud adds to the conversation on masculine violence by suggesting that the use of violence and the obsession with guns as a means of obtaining masculinity is not limited to criminals (217). Her research provides support for the idea that gun violence is not the product of deviants in society, but that it is constructed through the gendered state. Klaus Theweleit’s Male Fantasies gives further insight into the objectification of male bodies in state institutions in the context of war. Theweleit says that guns, in particular, function as an extension of the soldier’s ego, a metal body that isn’t vulnerable to destruction (179). With this in mind, the violence in school shootings is worth considering in a broader philosophical context, as it suggests a shared human desire to feel powerful. From this, there remains the question of whether this is key to human nature in itself or if it is perhaps the product of the gendered state. Without power or violence, a young male would be isolated from his masculinity, and thus from those around him. Therefore, this issue is not only relevant when considering what political action might be taken to prevent future gun violence, but it is also important in understanding what human beings fear and what makes us capable of committing acts of terrible violence.

Hannah Arendt said that often impotence leads men to substitute violence for power (“A Special Supplement”). Arendt notes that anyone who is concerned with history and politics must examine the influence of violence in human affairs. Although she spoke mostly of violence and power in terms of governmental control and international relations, I believe that violence has a relationship with the individual.  For example, the act of violence in a shooting appears to be a last ditch attempt at dominating and regaining power in a world where masculinity is constructed around violence. Michael S. Kimmel and Matthew Mahler consider the construction of masculine power as violence and how homophobic bullying especially contributes to feelings of inadequacy (1452). According to them, these young boys who participate in acts of school violence are not anomalies but they are actually a product of a dominant masculinity that recognizes violence as an appropriate response to humiliation and domination (1440).  

R.W. Connell conceives of the state as a process built on and through gender relations (519). She comes to this conclusion by critiquing several other theories of the state. She challenges the views of liberal, socialist, and anarchist scholars who, even when they recognize the state as an agent of domination, tend to present the citizens of the state as unsexed. The focus, for these scholars, is on class domination. For example, she says that the neo-liberal sociology of the state suggests that bourgeois citizenship is founded on the functioning patriarchal household, and yet it never takes the step to examine whether or not the state itself is gendered. Rousseau’s social contract is another example, where the subordination of women is presupposed without any exploration (511). Marxist theory, Connell says, simply assumes the existence of a gendered division of labor (510). The unequal treatment of women cannot be explained by natural sex differences, either. Research has shown that there is generally a similarity between women’s and men’s political attitudes, interests, and partisanship, suggesting that women’s place in the state is not based on some inherent difference (518).  

For R.W. Connell, the liberal feminist perspective is an exception to other theories of the state, in that it points out that women are not treated equally by the state and attempts to rectify this. It draws on the concept of equal rights, pointing out that women have been consistently mistreated by the state, and the root, they argue, is that the state has been captured by men (512). Connell does not wish to diminish the important changes that liberal feminism has brought about, but she does argue that the liberal feminist perspective is baseless and does not adequately explain the existence of patriarchy. Connell says that this theory suggests that patriarchy is an accident formed on baseless sexism, without any explanation for why patriarchy has collective interest. In this theory, patriarchy can be defeated simply by changing the attitudes of sexist men. She also suggests that liberal feminism has typically avoided issues related to violence, and that prominent liberal feminists have supported, for example, women’s entry into the army. This, she says, conflicts with feminist analyses of the use of force and violence by the state (513).  

Radical feminisms, on the other hand, suggest that male supremacy is reproduced by the social structure of the family, the workplace, the economy, schools, and more. Yet, R.W. Connell notes that these feminisms are based on socialist theories of class domination, and gender relations are considered to be secondary results of the interests of the bourgeoisie (514). Connell proposes a framework which sees gender relations not as merely the result of men's’ interests, or the interests of the bourgeoisie, but as a part of the state.  She uses violence as a specific example of the state’s interaction with gender, noting how domestic violence and gay bashing have both been considered legitimized uses of force in liberal states. This legitimacy is created through various social institutions, including laws that criminalize sexualities, and the organization of violence in prisons and war. The distinction between Connell’s theory and others is that the state is not just a tool for men to oppress women, but the state itself relies on the the creation of new gender and race relations. She says that the history of the state, as a process and not with specific origin, has to consider the gendered division of labor and the institutionalization of violence. Furthermore, the organization of the state has created a connection between authority and violence, particularly among men, and a prioritization of rationality (520-521). She specifically points out the way that schools have prioritized technical science, one example of how institutions have been built around the idea of ideal masculinity. Connell argues that the state does not just reinforce gender relations, but it actively creates new categories and thus new historical possibilities (530). One of those historical possibilities is hegemonic masculinity.

Hegemonic masculinity suggests that there is no one definition of masculinity, that some forms of masculinity are normalized, and that the liberal state itself is both created by and contributes to the creation of gender relations (Connell and Messerschmidt 832). Furthermore, hegemonic masculinity is based on the idea that men express different forms of masculinity depending on a variety of influences including race, class, and sexuality. Connell and Messerschmidt give several examples of this, including the masculinites expressed by gay men, which are subordinated by straight men, and the Mexican term, machismo, which is a form of masculinity that is intertwined with Mexican nationalism (835).  Given this concept of multiple masculinities, hegemonic masculinity relies not on a majority of men who represent it, but it does require that all men position themselves in relation to it.

It may only be a few men that actually embody the dominant forms of masculinity, but all men are subordinated by them and participate in them (Connell and Messerschmidt 832). For example, there are men who benefit from patriarchy but who do not embody hegemonic masculinity, and these men are ultimately complicit in this structure (832). Hegemonic masculinities, though not always a reflection of reality, represent common ideals, fantasies, and desires of men (838). The framework of hegemonic masculinity has also been particularly relevant for research in studies on crime among men. Connell and Messerschmidt point out hegemonic masculinity’s influence in studies on men’s education and bullying, and susceptibility to crime and violence. In particular, they note that patterns of aggression are related to the pursuit of hegemonic masculinity (833-834). Hegemonic masculinity offers a unique perspective on men and violence that is inseparable from the creation of the modern liberal state, and it is a concept that is situated in the midst of a vast literature on gender relations.

Since the concept of hegemonic masculinity was first introduced there have been various criticisms directed at it, as well as contributions to the literature derived from it. R.W. Connell and James Messerschmidt outline and respond to some of these criticisms. The first one they mention is criticism of the concept of masculinity itself, through a realist and postructuralist point of view. Some people argue that the idea of masculinity is flawed because it suggests a false unity on the fluid reality of men, or it imposes a heteronormative conception of gender that dichotomizes the differences between men and women. In response to this Connell and Messerschmidt say that the idea that masculinity homogenizes men does not fit the reality of the vast research suggesting unique expressions of masculinities, even among people with female bodies (836). Connell and Messerschmidt define masculinity as something which has multiple social constructions based on local culture. According to them, masculinity is not a set of fixed characteristics but is a set of social actions which change in different settings (836). Another criticism of hegemonic masculinity that the authors present is the idea that hegemonic masculinity doesn’t pay enough attention to the specific subject’s formation of identity, focusing on the structure of masculinities instead. Connell and Messerschmidt disagree with this, arguing that hegemonic masculinity offers a view that embeds the subject in the history of masculinity as an organized structure of gender relations created through human interactions and practices, not separate from them (843). The authors also address is the idea that hegemonic masculinity tends to depict men in a completely negative light, as unemotional, non-nurturing, aggressive, and dispassionate. They refute this, arguing that hegemonic masculinity requires positive attributes. If hegemonic masculinity was solely based on violence and aggression then, while domination would be explained, it would fail to explain why a population would consent to a structure that values unreachable, idealized, versions of masculinity (841). In order to maintain hegemony, the people must be complicit in perpetuation of masculine ideals.

Mia Consalvo looks at Columbine for understanding how hegemonic masculinity may prove lethal for those embody masculine ideals. First she outlines the hierarchy of masculinities, with gay men and men of color typically being the examples of subordinated masculinities. Although these subcultures have their own roles for men, they are still ultimately subordinated by what is ideally masculine, which is the straight, white, middle-class, man. Consalvo believes that this hierarchy extend beyond gay men and men of color, however. She argues that schools play a role in the hierarchy of masculinities through their glorification of jock culture. She suggests that certain outcast groups of boys are subordinated by jock culture, and that these outcasts are treated with less respect than popular groups, sometimes even by teachers and administrators (Consalvo 30).

In the aftermath of Columbine, The Trench Coat Mafia, a group of outcasts that Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris were associated with, became the target of the media (Consalvo 34). This group, Consalvo says, consisted mostly of white males, and as such they were supposed to be in a position of privilege in comparison to other groups of men. However, they were considered to be weird, unpopular, geeks and were actually at the bottom of the hierarchy. Members of The Trench Coat Mafia reported that they were often harassed and bullied by other groups, and especially jocks. Consalvo suggests that the media downplayed the amount of bullying that the Trench Coat Mafia faced relating it simply to clique tensions or the act of being an “outcast-by-choice” (Consalvo 35). In actuality, if the “geeks” in the Trench Coat Mafia had rebelled against their position in the hierarchy, they might have been labelled as “monsters-in-waiting” (Consalvo 35). Given this, I don’t believe that Consalvo is suggesting that it is the students’ responsibility to prevent shootings by intervening in bullying or just being nicer to boys that don’t conform to gender roles. Rather, Consalvo is criticizing the way that the media depicted the Trench Coat Mafia, blaming the outcasts for their position in society, rather than examining the system that put them there.

Consalvo looks at the wider set of institutions that have created and maintained hegemonic masculinity. For example, the media, she says, has prevented an adequate discussion of the phenomenon of school shootings by painting school shooters, like the Columbine shooters, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, as deviants, sociopaths, and outside of mainstream society. The terms bloodbath and warzone were used in reporting on Columbine, creating a connection between the incident and the acts of violence committed by, for example, terrorists or an enemy force. In doing this, the media allows for violence to continue to be perpetuated as an okay means of expressing masculinity but only in certain ways (Consalvo 33). The school shooters are constructed as not the result of the culture, but as outsiders. She also points out that, although the media reported on the boys’ overt racism and possible neo-Nazi affiliation, overall structural racism and the profile of school shooters was still overlooked as a contributing factor (37).  

As urban violence in schools has declined and a shift to violence among white suburban students has become more prevalent, there are no longer claims about the the “inherent violence” of certain racial or ethnic groups being at the root of the problem. Instead, the white school shooter is assumed to have psychological problems, and furthermore the boys are depicted as deviants and not the product of culture (Kimmel and Mahler 1443). Kimmel and Mahler examine the context of these shootings and suggest that their acts of violence are the result of a culture that values a certain violent conception of masculinity. They look at several school shooters and point out that in nearly all of the stories the boys faced homophobic bullying (1445). Interestingly enough, however, none of the shooters that they looked at were actually gay. Their hypothesis then is not that LGBT people are more likely to commit acts of violence, but that heterosexual men who are bullied as though they were gay feel a need to reassert their masculinity which may result in these acts of violence (1449). The authors not that research has shown that homophobia is an organizing principle of heterosexual masculinity, and that boys tend to use certain strategies to avoid the label, including excessive risk-taking, homophobic bullying, and participating in sexual assault (1446).

Kimmel and Mahler outline the stories of boys who have participated in school violence as examples of how homophobic bullying and emasculation can lead to violence. For instance, Luke Woodham who was overweight and considered to be a nerd was often called him “gay” or “fag”, while his mother called him fat, stupid, and lazy. He ultimately killed his mother, and then drove to school and killed two students. He told one of the school administrators that, “The world has wronged me”, and in a psychiatric interview after the event he said that he is not insane but angry (Kimmel and Mahler 1447). Furthermore, he said that murder is gutsy and daring and that he killed people because people like him are mistreated. Michael Carneal is another example, as students teased him, pulled his pants down in front of his classmates, and called him “faggot” and “gay”. He stole a number of guns and ammunition and showed them off to some of his classmates. He then brought them to school, hoping that the guys would find him cool, but when the cool guys ignored him, he shot and killed 3 classmates. Carneal, now serving life in prison, said, “People respect me now” (1447). As suggested by R.W. Connell’s concept of hegemonic masculinity, these boys were attempting to gain masculinity through the violence which has been legitimized by the state and culture. The question remains, however, why are white boys more likely to commit these acts of violence? Kimmel and Mahler suggest that white boys, as privileged over other ethnic groups, are supposed to be “real men” that embody independence, invulnerability, and stoicism. When they fail to embody this, and thus fail to get the privileges that they believe they are entitled, they react with violence in order to assert their masculinity (1453).

Angela Stroud adds to this conversation by suggesting that the use of violence and the obsession with guns as a means of obtaining masculinity is not limited to criminals. She conducted a study on lawful gun owners in Texas where she interviewed 20 men with concealed handgun licenses. The results of her study found that most of the men saw owning a gun as a central part of their role as a husband, father, and protector (Stroud 217). For example, one man, Adam, seemed excited to speak about his role in the family as the defender, with his wife and children being dependant on him. Adam also said that he liked guns because it didn’t matter the size or strength of the criminal, he was capable of defending himself. Stroud points out that this comment suggests that Adam, as a man, doesn’t necessarily need to be the gun owner. His wife, even if she is physically weaker than him, would be just as capable of defending the family with the gun. This suggests a connection between guns, aggression, and masculinity (225). Older men, on the other hand, saw guns as a means to retaining their ability to physically dominate other men despite their age and waning lack of strength. A 66 year old man, Gil, said that he carries a gun because he does not want to be in a position where someone else can have control over him (228). The gun, for Gil and many other older men, is used to defend oneself against domination (229). Others suggested that their use of guns was good and just, in contrast to the other, lesser, forms of masculinity such as those of men of color (217). One participant, Jack, tells a story about how he once pulled his gun out when he was stopped by a man in a predominantly black neighborhood and asked for directions (231). What is significant about this encounter, as well as several others, is that the white men were never actually threatened when they felt the need to take out their guns (233). This suggests that merely the idea of being dominated by a black man is threatening to them.

Angela Stroud suggests that the men’s willingness to engage in violence is an embodiment of their desire to show that they are real men who are not weak or afraid. Several of the men that Stroud interviewed confessed that they would be unlikely to be around to protect their wife and children from harm, and that their wives would be more likely to have to use a gun. Guns, then, are symbols of masculinity which may not actually prove useful (Stroud 226). In particular, guns are symbols of white masculinity, as many of these men spoke of feeling the need to carry a gun in so-called “dangerous” neighborhoods, which they described using racialized language like “predominantly black” or “gangster” (231-232). Stroud comes to the conclusion concealed handguns reproduce hegemonic masculinity, and they allow for good guys to fantasize about facing violence from other men and being able to defend themselves (234). Based on this study it appears that the fantasy of using guns to fight the bad guys is not only acceptable, but it is a celebrated form of masculinity (Stroud 218). It is not difficult to imagine, then, how this idealized violence could turn into something like a violent school shooting, a means of getting back at the people that these young boys believe are the “bad guys”. Yet, the use of guns by good guys to fight bad guys is rarely implemented (226). The gun, and violence, as a symbol of white male masculinity becomes clear even through the perspectives of lawful citizens.

Klaus Theweleit analyzes the writings of men on the battlefield in World War II in order to further explain the connection between white men, sexuality, violence, and the instruments of violence. He says that the soldier longs for his body to shoot forward, to penetrate other bodies, and to ultimately explode. However, a soldier also desires to live, and it is impossible for his body to explode without dying. A gun, on the other hand, is capable of withstanding explosions. The gun acts as the soldier’s ego, an impenetrable body which can be used to penetrate other bodies. The use of guns allows for a, “shot— leveled at the universe, at its entire faulty structure” (Theweleit 179). Furthermore, he says that these soldiers desire to penetrate, to explode, and to become the stronger because in this manner they gain entry into life (183). This desire to explode is a desire to transcend one’s own body, the boundaries of one’s ego, and in a sense guns allow this (180). However, Theweleit says that, in the act of killing, a soldier is “cold metal,” and incapable of feeling (180). Although the soldier achieves his goals and his libido reaches his target, the tension that he desires to discharge through explosion seems insufficient (181).

In order to kill the soldier must think ice-cold, as if he were a machine, and yet at the same time he feels intense pleasure, perhaps even to the point of tears (Theweleit 193). Theweleit says that, for the soldier, they experience their most intense feelings in isolation from themselves and so their discharge never truly brings the release that they desire (194). He gives the example of the knight who, when faced with the creation of new weapons of destruction, responds by reinforcing his old armor in the hopes that it can serve new purpose. This, he says, leads to a “monstrosity that expends every ounce of its energy in maintaining the appearance of invulnerability” (202). While the invulnerable, the steel impenetrable body, is the soldier’s ideal, it is unachievable and his ego always remains capable of being fragmented under emotional pressure (207). Although Theweleit is writing about the soldier, I believe that this desire to embody coldness and invulnerability extends to men in the general sense and especially to those young boys who wish to achieve invulnerability in the form of hegemonic masculinity and through violence.

Hannah Arendt suggests that a distinction must be made between power, violence, authority, and strength, and this is crucial to my argument about hegemonic masculinity as self-defeating. She says, firstly, that violence has been extremely prevalent in the history of human affairs, and so an explanation of what it is and its relation to power is necessary (Arendt, On Violence 8). Some philosophers, like Engels, argue that violence is the accelerator of economic development and politics, but Arendt suggests that the use of pure violence would not accelerate development, it would destroy it. Russian physicist, Sakharov (qtd. in Arendt) said, “A thermonuclear war cannot be considered a continuation of politics by other means (according to the formula of Clausewitz). It would be a means of universal suicide” (9). She notes that, with our current instruments of violence, a few weapons could destroy national power in a matter of moments, and so soon enough it may be that the number of weapons that a state has may not be an indication of its strength (10). The terms violence, strength, authority, and power, then, are not interchangeable.

Violence, among both the Left and the Right, has typically been considered the ultimate manifestation of power (Arendt, On Violence 35). However, Arendt argues that it is the people’s support that lends power to the institutions of a country, not the violent instruments that the state has. Furthermore, she says that political institutions begin to decay when the power of the people is no longer behind them (41).  For example, a government tried to give a command and no one in the police force or military was willing to follow the command, the government would be powerless (Arendt, “A Special Supplement”). Violence, unlike power, does not require numbers. It does, however, require instruments. Arendt says, “The extreme form of power is All against One, the extreme form of violence is One against All. And this latter is never possible without instruments” (Arendt, On Violence 42). Based on this distinction between power and violence, she says that the most effective command comes from the barrel of a gun, but that power can never grow out of it and is, in fact, destroyed (53).

Richard J. Bernstein’s review of On Violence offers a connection of this piece to Arendt’s previous work, giving background to her thoughts. First, he states that this piece in particular sets up Arendt’s conception of violence as power not just as distinguishable but as antithetical (Bernstein 6). Arendt’s conception of politics is important because she views it as the acting together of humans as political equals, and so persuasion and not violence must be at the core of the political (9). Furthermore, Bernstein suggests that as long as Arendt’s idea of natality exists, that is the freedom of human beings to act together in new and unprecedented ways, power can always be born (13). This idea in particular gives hope to the possibility of changing the structures that currently exist. He argues, in accordance with Arendt, that violence alone can never bring about a revolution even if it is necessary (14). So, in light of the issue of school violence, the boys who commit school shootings in the name of standing up for other victims of ridicule actually do very little in terms of starting a revolution because they lack power. Finally, Bernstein says that Hannah Arendt does not mean to depict violence as inherently bad because it is actually present and necessary in the creation of the world, but that violence is bad when it is treated as a mean to gain power and is therefore legitimized (18, 20).

Although Arendt is speaking mostly in terms of the power and violence of the state, I believe her ideas also apply to individuals as a part of these states. For example, she suggests that violence is often a reaction to rage. However rage is very particular, in that it is not necessarily a reaction to misery and suffering on its own, but it arises when one suspects that the conditions could be changed and aren’t (Arendt, On Violence 63). The profile of the typical school shooter is typically a young white boy who has failed to achieve some socially acceptable form of hegemonic masculinity, and therefore he is not included within the dominant group. He is isolated from his peers, and is, essentially, the “All Against One” that Arendt described in On Violence (42). He is powerless to change his circumstances, the state that was constructed around gender, and so he reacts with violence in an attempt to gain power and to change those circumstances. Violence is considered an appropriate way to gain power and masculinity. The relationship between violence and masculinity is something that Arendt does not consider, but it is necessary in order to understand how violence has been embedded into culture. The connections between violence, gender, and race, reveal an issue with how the state has been structured in order to dominate and oppress certain types of people.  

I have established, in the general sense, how the state works in perpetuating hegemonic masculinity and legitimizing the masculine drive for violence, but there still remains the question of how hegemonic masculinity works in tandem with violence in order to destroy power. In hegemonic masculinity, the power lies in those who most closely conform to the hegemony. This is because, as a whole, society continues to conform to hegemony, even those who are in subjugated forms of masculinity. In fact, by the very act of using violence in the form of school shootings, those men who have been subjugated are legitimizing violence as a means of taking back their masculinity and dominating the other. If we believe Arendt it is true that violence, through the use of a gun, would guarantee instant obedience (On Violence 53). This, however, is not power. Luke Woodham shot and killed two students he claimed that he was doing it for people like him, young men who were bullied and emasculated, because the world had wronged him (Kimmel and Mahler, 1447). He was angry with a system of gender that has been set up to value some masculinities over others, and for men to place most or all of their value in their ability to conform to those standards. When Woodham killed his fellow classmates, he was displacing his rage at the injustice of the system to people who, like him, were socialized to believe that their worth was in their masculinity.

When a shooter like Woodham commits an act of violence like this, they do so in an attempt to immortalize their body, to become impenetrable, capable of discharging their feelings. However, as Theweleit notes in the case of war, in the moment of killing the shooter is isolated from themselves and so their discharge never truly brings the release that they desire (194). The shooters do not gain power because they never gain the support of those around them. In the end they are still isolated, and the system that failed them is not questioned. In the act of violence, the shooter actually disintegrates his own power as well as the power of those around him, but he does little to change the power of the state in constructing dangerous hegemonic masculinity. Furthermore, violence is not gender neutral, although Arendt examines it in this manner. To call violence gender neutral would be to ignore the structure of the state and the processes that lead to violence being legitimized.

Based on these analyses, I suggest that in order to address the United States’ problem with gun violence, we must examine how the state functions as a gendered process and change it. This is not an easy task, because the state is not simply a person or place that can be altered. The institutions that the state consists of include marriage, the military, prison systems, etc.  Changing these structures may even entail the disintegration of the state as we know it entirely. R.W. Connell suggests that the solution to changing the state may lie in reshaping the current state structures and getting rid of the masculinized core and militarization (537). Changing the state also entails changing the culture, and particularly the culture around gender. This is a task without a clear solution. However, one thing that can and should be addressed is the association of guns with the American man’s sense of masculinity, as well as the availability of these weapons of violence to young men. As Arendt says, violence is never possible without instruments (On Violence 42). Still, this is merely a temporary solution. The state will ultimately only change when the people work together to change the institutions that reinforce gender roles, and this requires numbers and power.

Works Cited

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Chicagotribune.com, 2018, www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/commentary/ct-america-school-shootings-20180215-story.html.

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[nonamememoir]

Pain, Ritual, and Symbolism as Fascist Tools: Should the United States be Worried about Fascism? By Tori Bloom

Sometimes kind people do unkind things. When this happens, we may assume that the truth is that the person is not really kind, as their actions do not suit the trait we assigned to them.  However, this is an error in which we place too much emphasis on the role of character traits in action and not enough emphasis on the situation (Goldie, 2000). When we consider, for example, the Nazis in Germany as well as the countless citizens who supported Adolf Hitler, we could argue that the people of Germany were cruel and evil. However, this does not take into consideration the situation which influenced the population. It is this relationship, the one between a situation and a person’s actions, that I wish to examine in regards to how a nation could come to embrace fascism. In particular, I will look at how a fascist regime could potentially manipulate a populace through ritual practice. Furthermore, I plan to look at how the identity of this new self is often based on contrasting oneself against another group. In the case of the Nazis, the self was mainly formed on the foundation of not being Jewish. Ernst Junger’s (2008) On Pain is especially significant in exploring the role of the self in crafting one’s values and how the self can be affected by pain. Simon Taylor’s (1981) Symbol and Ritual under National Socialism examines the National Socialist Party’s use of ritual in gaining and maintaining support. Following an analysis of these works, I will make that case that fascist movements start to take root as old values are dissolved by pain and new ones need to be found, and that fascist regimes, such as the National Socialist Party, seek to shape a populace and keep them under control through ritual practice. Furthermore, it is the synthesis of these conditions which creates an environment in which a population, and even individuals, are capable of participating in events like the Holocaust. Once I establish this, I will explore whether or not it is actually possible to psychologize fascism in this way by looking at the similarities between fascism in Germany and in Italy. Through my analysis I will argue that it is possible and I will look at the implications this has on fascism in modern society and the susceptibility of nations like the United States to fascism.

Ernst Junger (2008) discusses pain’s influence on one’s values and sense of self and how this relationship is leading us to a world where people are merely extensions of technology. Junger says that destruction is indifferent to who or what it destroys, and that this random and unfeeling chaos is what makes people question their values. No matter how intelligent one is, or kind, or strong, when it comes to something like war no one is safe from pain on the basis of what virtues they have. Great cities have come and gone, just as all human beings will eventually die. One’s values seem meaningless in the face of inevitable pain and death, and with the loss of values one’s sense of self becomes difficult to place. Junger says that people can be drawn to religious sects or cults because of the apocalyptic vision that the loss of values brings. Cults act as an outlet for fear. In the same manner, I would argue that people can be drawn to political ideologies, such as fascism. The avoidance of pain is what Junger believes is at the core of liberal society. He calls this the world of sensitivity. He does point out, however, that pain is not completely absent in this world of sensitivity. Instead, pain becomes marginalized. He says that this is the case in, for instance, abortions. This is certainly true of Nazi Germany, where pain was regulated and distributed toward Jewish people. In the world of sensitivity, Junger believes the body to be valued above all else and pain as something to be avoided. Junger says that it is this valuing of the body that will lead to a society where human beings are nothing more than extensions of technology. In this society, for example, suicide missions will be seen as honorable and heroic as they represent giving up one’s body for the greater good. Martyrdom, then, is increasingly valuable. To Junger, however, this is a good thing. He does not think that we can go back to the heroic world, where pain was faced head on as an act of courage. Rather, he thinks that objectification is inevitable and allows us to face pain by making it seem inconsequential. If the body becomes an extension of technology then it would be no more painful to sacrifice one’s self than to sacrifice a missile, for instance. While my point is that Junger is right in saying that pain and the breakdown of values can lure people toward cults, sects, and perhaps even fascism, I do not agree that objectification of the body is a good thing. For the sake of this argument, I will focus on the former assertion.

Ernst Junger’s (2008) ideas on pain explain how pain dissolves the values and the self, but he does not consider enough the influence of ritual in reshaping a populace. Societies fleeing from pain do not merely idolize and objectify the body, but they seek out community and constant reinforcement of their values. In the case of Nazi Germany, Simon Taylor (1981) argues that symbols and ritual were integral for the National Socialist Party in suggesting internal consensus and therefore maintaining control. Taylor says that these rituals and symbols were not merely the expressions of a population of radical people devoted to Hitler, but that they were also a means of mythologizing their beliefs. Simon Taylor addresses not only celebrations that were National Socialist creations, but he also points out that holidays which already had ties to German culture were reinvented. For example,Taylor talks about how Remembrance Day, a day meant for mourning fallen veterans, was remade into a day to celebrate how heroic those veterans were and to admire Germany’s new found pride. This example is a clear metaphor of Junger’s claim that old values are dissolved and replaced with new ones. An old holiday was reshaped to display the values of the new Germany. Then Taylor discusses how Hitler used ritual to reinforce the idea of martyrdom and destroy any evidence of the failure of the Nazi Party. He discusses, in particular, Hitler’s yearly celebration of November 9th, 1923, a day when the Nazi Party failed to seize power in a coup and lost several party members. By choosing to celebrate this failure and the martyrdom of those who died, Hitler reframed the failure as a necessary bump on the path to success. Taylor says that the Blood Flag was the most powerful symbol used during this ritual, as it was meant to be reminiscent of the Christian cross. The relationship that the flag created between Christ’s sacrifice and the sacrifice of the fallen Nazi Party members crafted a religious narrative of the German people, with Hitler as the savior and Germany as the homeland. These celebrations were vital to the National Socialists because they did not just act as a means for the mob of followers to feel represented. They also created a sense of community for the masses, making them more open to suggestibility (pp. 512). The atmosphere of these celebrations was one tied to religion, a feeling of mysticism and perhaps, a sense of divine destiny. Hitler himself became a symbol of the messiah. The rituals, the symbols, and the values emphasized by the National Socialist Party were tools to reframe history and maintain control and consensus, but these values were not necessarily completely new. Rather, they drew on borrowed concepts tied to religion, blood, soil, and race. Taylor describes this as plagiarism of Christian myth (pp. 514). These symbols themselves were just as important in reshaping the German people’s values as was the pain and loss from World War I.

Ernst Junger (2008) sets up a framework for understanding how pain dissolves the self, and Simon Taylor (1981) explains how National Socialism made use of ritual and symbolism to influence the population. My goal is to explain how these conditions, the loss of self and the influence and manipulation of the populace through ritual, created a situation where something like the Holocaust was possible. With the economic depression following World War I, as well as the increasing doubt in the effectiveness of the German government, pain was introduced to the German populace in copious amounts. Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist Party created propaganda and an image for a new, prideful, and idealistic Germany. As Taylor notes, Hitler created a sense of community through rituals and symbols, bound by a religious narrative and values of loyalty, German pride, self-sacrifice, and obedience. If Ernst Junger is right, this likely came just as the German populace was reeling from a loss of self and values. It was an outlet for a population attempting to avoid pain at all costs. At this very fragile period of time, Hitler created an enemy for the Germans. According to Hitler, these new values, the new German sense of identity, were under attack by Jewish people. Simon Taylor says that the Nazi depictions of Jewish people as subhuman were yet another part of the symbolic world that they created.  Now, a culture with already firm values and traditions might not easily turn to violence, even in the face of already deeply-ingrained anti-semitic views and reinforcing propaganda. When the core of a nation’s values are uprooted by pain and then replaced by something new, or at least reshaped and modified, it is possible that a nation can be primed for more radical action to occur. In the face of pain, the Germans were given an outlet and a new sense of self, only to have that new self to be shaken up and threatened. Hitler planted the seeds of doubt into the minds of the German people, and in their attempt to avoid falling back into the pain of post World War I Germany they followed his lead. The German people sought out a leader who reinvigorated their sense of national pride, and Hitler used this desperate nationalism and crafted religious narrative to direct hatred toward Jewish people and give the German citizens and object for their frustrations.

So far I have argued that people become susceptible to fascism when their values are destroyed in the face of pain and that fascist leaders manipulate people by creating new values that are grounded in religious symbolism and a mythologized past and future. The next question is what kind of leader is capable of this manipulation and what makes a population latch onto anti-semitism, racism, or xenophobia, even though these ideas seem to contradict rational thought. Leo Lowenthal and Norbert Guterman (1949) address the first part of the question in Prophets of Deceit. They describe the methods of an agitator, the leader of such rhetoric, to be a common thread amongst speakers like them. They say that the agitator appeals not to completely foreign and new ideas, but rather appears to come from within the crowd and voice what they were already thinking. The agitator appears to advocate for the good of the group and for social change, but is unlike a social reformer because they do not present solutions based on the actual problems. Instead, the agitator gives the mob an object to place their frustrations on. The reason that anti-semitism may become appealing is that it is easier for the frustrated crowd to identify an object and attack it, thus feeling instant gratification, then to accept that there is something wrong with the system itself and to change that. In the case of Nazi Germany, the object was Jewish people. Another important aspect of the mob is that the object their frustrations are directed toward, such as Jewish people, must have certain qualities. The object has to be tangible, and yet distant enough that the illusion of it being the enemy is not destroyed. It must be tied to history and tradition and it must have features which work with the prejudiced person’s destructiveness (Adorno et al., 1993, pp. 300). These features allow the mob to attribute and maintain stereotypes toward a group which is distant enough to be an “other” and yet close enough to be a threat. Furthermore, it explains why specific groups may have been targeted by fascist leaders. However, it is not simply the prospect of instant gratification, nor prejudices, that draws a mob to the agitator. Theodor Adorno (1978) suggests that a leader like the agitator is only able to influence people to go against rational thought by forming a bond with them. He draws upon Freud’s notion of libido as the tie between the leader and his followers, claiming that in the case of fascism the mob lives vicariously through the leader, identifying with him and reaping narcissistic benefits, stemming from the libido, from this identification. The agitator becomes an extension of the follower’s ego (pp. 124-125). This would explain why it is difficult for a follower of someone like Hitler to criticize his methods, no matter how violent they are; an insult against the agitator becomes an insult to the self. The agitator, however, is not merely an extension of the self, Adorno notes. In fact, he is an idealized version of the self. Whereas a follower leader may believe himself to be flawed, the follower can project his ego onto the ideal leader and get rid of whatever frustration he has with himself. The leader is the embodiment of the follower’s wish to be subject to authority and also the authority themselves. This is relevant to Ernst Junger’s (2008) ideas about the breakdown of values and the self because once the agitator becomes idealized, the reflection of the follower’s ego, a source of narcissistic gain, and the embodiment of instant gratification, the follower can be more easily manipulated. After all, if the leader is an ideal self, then he can’t do wrong. If the follower were to admit the leader was wrong, particularly when it comes to his values, this extended ego would shatter, and the follower would have to face the same loss of values he did in the face of pain. With the agitator as his leader and some outside group as his enemy, a follower of a fascist regime has his sense of self placed almost entirely in these things and not himself. This opens the follower up to suggestion, and it is how the agitator can manipulate the mob into going along with even violent acts like the Holocaust.

Fascism is complex, and therefore we might wonder if it is possible to adequately describe how it takes root in a culture by only examining the psychology behind it. Economic factors, cultural factors, and pre-existing biases and prejudices all shape fascism. Fascism in Italy, for example, might not look exactly the same as it did in Germany. This is one of the reasons why fascism does not have a strict definition. However, I would argue that the psychology behind fascism is key in whether or not a culture might be susceptible to it. It is the synthesis of pain, the existence of an agitator, the culture, and the manipulation and suggestibility of the population that brings fascism into being and allows it to take form in various ways. Charles Burdett’s (2003) analysis of fascism in Italy provides evidence that the ideology takes root in much the same way that it did in Germany, despite not having the same appearance. He says that fascism in Italy was able to extend the boundaries of the state through both coercion and by suggesting a vision of Italy that many citizens were able to embrace and therefore bringing about mass consensus. He also discusses Emilio Gentile's interpretation of fascism and the ability of fascists to form their own set of beliefs, practices, and myths, much like I have suggested German fascists did. Burdett examines fascism in Italy by comparing it to the vision of a utopia. A utopia is secularized religion, or an idealized society that can and is worshipped. The vision that fascism creates is like this utopia, adapting and using religious symbolism and infiltrating the world of Christianity. Mussolini, like Hitler, promised a vision of Italy as an empire, rich with prosperity and and power, and used this promise to gain support and military power (pp. 95). For Italy, the vision fascism created was one that called upon the greatness of the Roman Empire, using images of ancient Roman figures whilst simultaneously ignoring the negative aspects of Rome and the periods of decline. Mussolini campaigned for destroying evidence of moral decline in Italy following the Roman empire, even going so far as to destroy housing around the Colosseum. In the place of the buildings they destroyed would be a road that would link ancient Rome to modern Italy. This is reminiscent of Hitler’s treatment of Remembrance Day, as both acted as a symbol of uniting the past with the present and, in fascist Italy, it was done quite literally by building a road between the Colosseum to the Altar to the Nation. Italy held many exhibitions celebrating the glory of the past and their achievements, and these exhibitions were one way to open the people up to suggestibility. Burdett says that visitors to these exhibitions were meant to leave with a sense of community, pride, and belonging. Ancient Rome, in a sense, acted as mirror to Italian Fascism, and in it the followers could see the idealized version of fascism, a utopia (pp. 99). What this shows is that, despite the fact that fascist Italy looked quite different from fascist Germany, it still drew upon the same mythologized and utopian vision that Germany did. Mussolini, like Hitler, was able to open his citizens up to fascism by providing a strong sense of community and maintaining it through symbolic and ritualistic practices.

Given the role of the agitator in creating a sense of community through ritual and symbolism, it would appear that any nation under the right circumstances could be subject to fascism or, at the very least, mass suggestion. Not even the United States, despite the decades that have passed since the rise of fascism, is immune to the tactics used by an agitator.  Stephen Reicher and S. Alexander Haslam (2016) provide an analysis of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and show just how he was able to create a mass identity among his followers, gaining support and ultimately winning the 2016 presidential election. It would be easy, they note, to write off Donald Trump’s supporters as racists, sexists, or idiots, but this does not explain how he managed to gain so much support, and it does not accurately depict all of them. They do note that all of his supporters had to be at least willing to overlook his racist comments toward Mexicans and Muslims, but this does not mean this was the main reason that people supported him. Reicher and Haslam mention Theodore Abel, who ran a contest asking for Nazi Party members’ autobiographies. While reading these autobiographies it became clear to him that, although a great deal of the members were racist and anti-semitic, many of them joined the party for other reasons, including a feeling of hope amidst the decline of Germany, a desire to restore Germany’s past greatness, and a fear of social disorder and the yearning for a leader to unite them again. Their point in mentioning this, and mine as well, is not that Trump’s movement or his followers are no different than Nazis. However, his tactics for gaining support and his crafting of an ingroup and outgroup dynamic resembled the tactics used by the Nazi Party, perhaps suggesting that people can become vulnerable to manipulation and that agitators like Donald Trump may take advantage of this. Symbolism and rituals play a key role in this manipulation.

Reicher and Haslam (2016) refer to Trump as a collective sensemaker, capable of shaping a community by manipulating the self-perspective of his audience and channeling that into a particular vision of America. His rallies were one way in which he was capable of doing this, the atmosphere itself representative of a vision of America as a united community full of hope and with a mission for the world, much like the utopian vision that Mussolini used in Italy (Burdett, 2003). The first thing about Trump Rallies that Reicher and Haslam point out is the long, and intentional, wait that supporters must go through before Trump goes on stage. They say that this delay itself is meant to alter the supporter’s image of himself and those around him, believing that because they are willing to wait so long then Donald Trump and the event must be very important to them. This creates a sense of shared identity and community among the supporters. The security practices at Trump rallies extended to the supporters who would often look around the crowd for anyone not showing enough excitement. This ritual aspect of the rallies further cemented the idea among Trump supporters that they were under attack, both within the group and outside of it. Furthermore, if any protester was spotted, supporters were encouraged to shout Trump’s name over and over to alert the security and other supporters around them that there was an enemy in the group. Then there were Trump’s actual speeches, which painted a picture of America as a country with noble goals but goals that they could not reach because of enemies within, including politicians like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton or lobbyists and special interests groups. He suggested these enemies within were working with enemies outside of the group, including China and Mexico. Trump’s speeches voiced and intensified his supporters’ distrust in the government and gave his followers objects to voice their frustration toward. Furthermore, by creating an association between the enemies within and those on the outside he made them seem more formidable and united (Lowenthal & Guterman, 1949). This was particularly evident in his treatment of Mexicans, who he claimed were stealing American jobs and coming over illegally and spreading crime and drugs. Like the supposed Jewish problem in Nazi Germany, where Jews are painted as simultaneously weak and strong and in control of everything behind the scenes, Donald Trump suggested that the reason why America was failing was because American politicians were being controlled by external enemies. Finally, after creating this sense of community and shared values as well as objects to direct frustrations toward, Donald Trump gave his supporters a solution, him. As Lowenthal and Guterman noted, the agitator does not appear to voice new and foreign values, but seems to come from within the group itself. Reicher and Haslam point out that Donald Trump, while certainly not the typical American considering his wealth, made himself appear to be the epitome of the ingroup of Americans that supported him.  He deliberately went against political rules and the status quo, cementing himself as a representation of his anti-political followers. Yet he, like the stereotypical agitator, is the idealized version of the group. He is wealthy, successful, blunt, and he lives a luxurious and glamorous lifestyle, one which his followers can look up to. He satisfies the desire of the community to feel united with him, to place their ego in him, and also to feel dominated and to admire his achievements as something they might achieve with his help.  Reicher and Haslam ultimately argue that Trump was able to use ritual to create a sense of “us”, a community with a vision for an America that is not hindered by external and internal enemies.

The speeches and rallies are not the only tactics that Donald Trump used to gain support. His campaign slogan “Make America Great Again” calls upon a myth of a past America, one that should be returned to in order to restore the country to a greatness it once had. In Italy, Mussolini used Ancient Rome as a model, whereas Trump’s slogan does not specify what previous model of America should be followed (Burdett, 2003). However, it doesn’t matter that he did not specify what the model should be because suggesting that America was great in the past neglects all of the variation in the country’s history and mythologizes the image of the past that his supporters recall. As Burdett pointed out in Mussolini’s depiction of Ancient Rome, to call America’s past great would be to ignore the periods of decline and set an unattainable goal, because the problem is never addressed by trying to go back to a point in time that never actually existed. The slogan is also versatile, in that it can be used by white supremacists to support an image of America before globalization and immigration, but it also plays upon the fears of those who wish the return to America before 9/11, before the 2008 recession, and before the threat of nuclear war. For either one of these groups, the white supremacists or those who have faced the pain of the war on terror and the recession, the utopian image of America’s past is not real. Furthermore, aiming to make America great in the way that it supposedly used to be doesn’t address the real problems within the system, but it gives these groups something to hope for and something to take their frustrations out on. White supremacists aside, those Donald Trump supporters who have had their values dismantled by the pain of terrorism, poverty, and unemployment have realistic concerns that might not be addressed well by the current system. These people have the potential to change the system and become social reformers, but an agitator can  manipulate that potential and use it to gain support (Lowenthal & Guterman, 1949).

Donald Trump himself may or may not be fascist, but he did use many of the same techniques that fascist leaders did to gain control. When faced with pain and frustration with the system, people followed Donald Trump because he gave them hope and a utopian vision for the future. There are dangers in electing a leader who uses these techniques to build a following. Firstly, there is the fact that his followers have placed their ego in him. If Ernst Junger (2008) is right that we live in a world of sensitivity and that we will do anything to avoid pain, and the loss of our values, then this ego displacement will make it difficult for Donald Trump’s followers to criticize him. He is the idealized version of themselves, and any threat to that image would be a threat to themselves. Another danger lies in the dynamic between his followers and the outsider groups that Donald Trump has created. A person’s identity as a Trump supporter means that they are willing to consider Mexican people and other immigrants to be enemies who are in control of the circumstances of unemployment in America. This is evident by the support shown for Donald Trump when he said that a wall should be built between the United States and Mexico. Although a wall along the border is not the same as the camps that Jewish people were forced into in Nazi Germany, the distance between voters and immigrants is the same. Given the outcome in Nazi Germany, the similar insider-outsider dynamic in America now, the overall distrust of the American government, and the willingness to follow an agitator I argue that Americans are susceptible to supporting something like the Holocaust, even today.

Assuming for the sake of argument that anyone is susceptible to fascism, there remains the question of whether or not this is part of human nature or if it can be avoided. If we believe Junger (2008) then it is in human nature to want to avoid pain. When faced with the destruction of one’s values, it seems the only option is to rebuild them, and sometimes that means following an agitator. However, the agitator does not address the real problem and eventually those new values will also be destroyed. It seems that the best way to avoid fascism, then, is to educate the masses to choose social reform. Unfortunately, fascism is much more complex than that because the ego is manipulated and a community is built and shaped by the agitator through rituals and symbolism. I do not have a solution, but I don’t believe that fascism is unavoidable. When a nation faces pain, the outcome is not always dire. In Nazi Germany the loss of self brought on by by the pain following World War I became an opportunity for the National Socialists to seize power. In order to maintain power and consensus, the National Socialists used ritual and myth to promote values of nationalism, obedience, and loyalty (Taylor, 1981).  These new values were set on a weak and fictitious religious foundation and were thus easily shaken up when the Nazis crafted an enemy for the German people. With the agitator acting as an extension of the mob’s ego and Jewish people being treated as a threat to the ego, the German people become open to violence in order to protect their community. Ultimately, the Holocaust is one example of how fascist leaders can use and manipulate a situation so that a large group of people can become capable of violent acts. This is a trend that is not unique to Germany, but lies at the core of fascism itself, as evidenced by the similar methods of manipulation that Mussolini used to maintain consensus in Italy. Although fascism looks different based on the culture in which it takes root, and perhaps cannot be fully explained by the psychology of ritualistic and symbolic practices on the mind, this psychology may help us understand how anyone is open to suggestion. If this is true, then even the United States is susceptible to fascist ideology.

References

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Flowerman, Eds.). W.W. Norton Company.

Adorno, T. W., & Gebhardt, E. (1978). Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda.

In A. Arato (Ed.), The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (pp. 118-137). New York: The

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Burdett, C. (2003). Italian Fascism and Utopia. History of the Human Sciences, 16(1), 93-108.

doi:10.1177/0952695103016001008

Goldie, P. (2000). The emotions: a philosophical exploration.

Jünger, E. (2008). On Pain (D. C. Durst, Trans.). New York: Telos Press Pub.

Löwenthal, L., & Guterman, N. (1949). Prophets of deceit: a study of the techniques of the

American agitator. New York: Harper and Brothers.

Reicher, S., & Haslam, S. A. (2016). The Politics of Hope: Donald Trump as an

Entrepreneur of Identity. Retrieved from

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-politics-of-hope-donald-trump-as-an-entrepreneur-of-identity/

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Sociology,32(4), 504-520. doi:10.2307/590130

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The Material and the Divine: Cosmologies and Finding Meaning by Tori Bloom

In this essay I will examine two vastly different cosmologies from different cultures. I am particularly intrigued by the question of how each cosmology overlaps in their consideration of ethics and how they each avoid or embrace the concept of the void and infinite division of parts. Specifically, I will analyze the perspective of the Greek Atomists and their materialist idea of creation, along with the perspective of Islamic philosophy and Ibn Sina, who proposed a divine creation. The key sources that I will focus on include David J. Furley’s The Greek Theory of the Infinite Universe, Lillian U. Pancheri’s Greek Atomism and the One and the Many, Jon McGinnis’s A Small Discovery: Avicenna’s Theory of Minima Naturalia, and Philosophy in the Middle Ages by Arthur Hyman, James J. Walsh, and Thomas Williams. However, I will also use a variety of background sources as support. Through my analysis I intend to argue that materialist cosmologies and divine creationist cosmologies are not so different., and I will develop the idea that despite the subjectivity of cosmology it may be our duty to study it.

The Greek Atomists argued that there is a universe of endless space, filled with infinite atoms and matter that construct infinite other worlds, that lies outside of the boundary of our own (Furley 575). According to Aristotle, the evidence for the infinite lies in the fact that all limited things are limited in that there is something else that limits them, and so there cannot plausibly be an ultimate limit, as it would have to be limited against another as well (577). Furley cites a thought experiment presented by the philosopher Archytas, who wondered if one was at the edge of the universe if it would be possible to stick one’s arm into the outer region of the universe. If the answer to that question is no, then it follows that something must be stopping one from reaching out. If the answer is yes, then it follows that there is something outside (578). However, these arguments only present the idea that something infinite exists outside of our world, and not what that infinite is. The atomists use an inductive argument to make a case for the existence of matter likes ours in the void. They suggest that nothing that we can observe is unique, in that we always find something else with the same properties. If it is true that nothing is unique, then it follows that our cosmos is not unique either (580).  Following the idea that there is an infinite void, we are brought to the question of why our world exists at this place in that void and then how the matter in it moves the way that it does. To the question of why our world is in the place that it is, the atomists had no answer except for suggesting that matter is equally spread across the void. This still leaves the question of why things would have a pattern of motion of rising and falling, but also of circular motion and how these patterns could be attributed to the collisions of atoms (580). The Stoics would suggest that there was a center of gravity within the void that all things moved around, however the atomists could not take this approach because they could not attribute this motion to atoms themselves. Furthermore, the atomists struggled with the idea of circular motion, as circular motion requires a center and the idea of an infinite void suggests that there is no center (581). Democritus’ solution was to suggest a whirl pattern of movement, due only to the jostling and collision of atoms. Yet this still holds flaws, in that it doesn’t necessarily explain why something would fall in a linear fashion. Furley holds that the atomists’ ideas about motion are flawed, but that they were important because they presented one of the first unified theories of motion (585).

In breaking the world down into atoms, there arises the problem of the one and the many and how unchanging atoms could constitute a changing reality (Pancheri 139). One argument is that the size, shape, and number of atoms account for the differences in objects. However, Aristotle argues that this does not account for an equal reality of atoms and compounds. He says that a thing can only be considered one when it has a continuous nature, and because compounds are capable of changing and the atoms in them capable of being rearranged, they are not one. He also posits that if atoms exist at different magnitudes, then it would seem that they have different parts as one would have the ability to point out the differences between the levels of magnitude, and therefore atoms would not be indivisible either (140). Epicurus, however, says that it is possible for atoms to both be distinguishable from each other and also indivisible from one another. He suggests that atoms have parts, but that these parts exist as minima, least parts, and cannot be divided up further (141). The minima are distinguishable, but are at the same time inseparable. This theory suggests that atoms themselves are both one and many. Furthermore, Epicurus presents a solution to the idea of compounds existing as parts and as one by saying that compounds are coterminous with the atoms that they are made of (143). Pancheri uses fire and iron as an example. The arrangement of atoms in a fire make it so that fire is hot. However, that heat is a property of fire is no more or less true than heat being a property of iron that has been placed in a fire. Even though the iron, once taken out of the fire, will eventually cool and its atoms will return to their original state, the quality of heat in a hot piece of iron is as real as the quality of ironness in it. This is because of that co-existence between the arrangement of atoms in an object and the object’s properties. Epicurus does not argue that compounds are indivisible physically in the same way that an atom is, but that because a compound object is the perceivable arrangement and qualities of the atoms that constitute it, it too is a one. That is, the body is indivisible in the sense that our perception of it relies on the indivisible attributes of the atoms themselves, and any change in the atoms constitutes a change in what that body itself is (143).  Following this logic, the one can be the many just as much as the many are the one, and we can allow for the idea that objects are not merely illusions of our perception (144).

With the groundwork for the atomists laid, there still comes the question of the, seemingly, opposing side; and that is the prospect of divine creation. Ibn Sina was a prominent medieval philosopher who subscribed to this cosmology through Islam. In particular, he argued for a necessarily existent being whose existence relies only on itself. He reaches this conclusion first by suggesting that all things exist as the effects of other things that caused them. They are possible things because their existence is relies on something else having to occur for them to exist, making their existence contingent. Ibn Sina says that without positing a necessarily existent being, one would have to assume that the possibly existent beings go on ad infinitum, and that, according to him, would be absurd (Hyman et al. 244-245). Following this logic, there must be a necessary, self-existent, being from which all things came from. However, unlike many divine creationists, Ibn Sina says that this necessary being, which he suggests is God, cannot be defined by human properties, such as ‘good’, because that would mean that God is dependent upon the qualities that he has and would thus not be self-existent. Along that same line of thought, Ibn Sina says that God does not know about his creation in the sense that he is perceiving it, because that would suggest that there is knowledge that is outside of God and that, again, he is not self-existent, or at least not the only thing that is self-existent. Instead, Ibn Sina says that God intellects himself and knows his creation in the sense of universals within himself(246). Dimitri Gutas writes in the Stanford Encyclopedia on Ibn Sina that the philosopher further suggests that the goal of human life is to look employ our rational mind to look toward the intelligibles by means of coming into contact with the active intellect, an intellect of the celestial spheres that is closest to the terrestrial world. According to Gutas, this aligns with Aristotelian ethics, which argued that happiness (eudaimonia) is unique to humans, when compared to other species, in that we are capable of rational thought.  Gutas goes as far as saying that Ibn Sina’s philosophy is deeply concerned with ethics, because it suggests that it is our duty to use our rational minds to become like the celestial intellects. Yet some of Ibn Sina’s ideas seem to conflict with the idea of ethics, as they suggest little room for free will. Ibn Sina says that the distinction between possibly and necessarily existent things is actually arbitrary because possibly existent things exist out of the necessity of an array of causes that brought them to be. That is, they are possibly existent in that they require something else to bring them into existence, but they are also necessarily existent because the causal nexus was set up in such a way that no other outcome could have occurred (249). The outcomes of the choices that we do not make do not exist, and never could have existed, because every outcome is the result of a myriad of causes. If this is true, then any choices that we make are the result of causes that we have no control over. Ibn Sina also posits that all causes and their effects exist simultaneously, and that we are just unable to perceive it (253). For example, the instant that we place our hand in a fire we are burned. We assume that we become burned after touching the fire, but in actuality it is that very instant that our hand and the fire meet that we are burned. If the causal nexus exists simultaneously, then the distinctions between the past and the present are the result of our flawed perceptions. Furthermore, it could again suggest that free will is meaningless, because all of our choices have already been made. Ibn Sina’s ideas, overall, suggest a divine, self-existent, being that is the first cause of everything else and through which all causes exist simultaneously, leaving little room for free will.

Unexpectedly, Ibn Sina’s cosmology does not completely oppose atomism. In fact, according to Jon McGinnis in his article A Small Discovery: Avicenna’s Theory of Minima Naturalia, Ibn Sina argued for the existence of things that could not be physically divided any further ( 9). Yet unlike Epicurus’ idea of least parts, Ibn Sina believes that these smallest things are physically indivisible but that they could, conceptually, be divided ad infinitum (1). He defends this view by arguing for the continuous. That is, the continuous occurs when two things share a relative limit. McGinnis uses the example of two lines forming an angle, both of which meet at the same limit to form one continuum (10). Furthermore, Ibn Sina suggests that the continuous is formed by enforcing accidental limits on things due to our perception of them. For instance, we may refer to one side of a table as the left side and one as the right side. In this case we are dividing the table into parts, which meet at a certain limit. However, the table is one continuous thing, and the limit is something that we impose on it (11). Still, there is no reason to suggest that this conceptual division by accidental partition should have a limit, as there is nothing to impede the division (12). Ibn Sina suggests still that, though conceptual infinite divisibility is possible, things are physically indivisible to a certain point because once a body is divided so much, it no longer retains its form (20).  Ibn Sina also presents that idea that the smaller the body, the more easily it can be influenced by its surroundings. For example, a ton of molten iron would take more time to cool down in water than an ounce of molten iron would (21). It is necessary to mention that, despite his agreement with the atomists on the physical indivisibility of things, Ibn Sina was not a proponent of atomism, particularly in its explanation of motion. In fact, Ibn Sina argued that the existence of the void made circular motion impossible (McGinnis 1).  He demonstrates this criticism through a diagram, where he pictures the sphere of our world within the void, rotating. He extends an imaginary infinite line through the void and from our sphere and suggests that, at some point, there is a moment where the two first meet, or a moment where they last meet. This suggests that their meeting is not infinite (3-5). So, the overlap between Ibn Sina’s theories concerning minimal parts and the atomists’ theories does not suggest complete synchronicity in their theories of physics.

Given the background for atomism and Ibn Sina’s perspective divine creationism, as well as Ibn Sina’s own concurrence with some of the prospects of atomism, the stark contrasts between materialism and creationism start to dissolve. For instance, it was mentioned that Ibn Sina was in agreement with the atomists that it is possible that there are parts that are physically indivisible. This, of course, does not mean that Ibn Sina supported all of the theories of the atomists. In fact, one of the biggest differences between creationist and materialist philosophies are their considerations of the soul. For example, Sylvia Berryman notes in the Stanford Encyclopedia that Democritus believed the soul to be constructed of a certain type of atom, specifically fire atoms, which moved about and brought rational thought to life. While, according to Dimitri Gutas, Ibn Sina saw the soul as an extension of the realm of intellects, with the human soul being a rational thing which seeks to gain knowledge of the intelligibles through the goading of the active intellect. These different conceptions of the soul, however, do not necessarily mean that the ethics derived from them are vastly different. In fact, I would argue that they are quite similar, in that they both suggest that pleasure is the meaning of life. Gutas says that, for Ibn Sina pleasure (eudaimonia) is found through intellection and rational thought. In fact, he makes intellection a prerequisite for pleasure in the afterlife. Furthermore, Ibn Sina says that it is our bodies that make us subject to a dampening of our intellects, and so tending to our bodies is necessary for rational thought. Democritus’ thoughts on ethics, though he is sometimes cited as a proponent of hedonism, follow a similar line of beliefs on the ideal state being one of balanced pleasure (McGibbon 77). Their similarities are evident likely because both philosophers borrow from Aristotle’s view of happiness. Ibn Sina’s ethics, however, are grounded in the belief of a God, and a yearning for our souls to reach his level of intellection. The atomists have no such God, aside from infinite matter and atoms that seem to exist with no purpose, and one could argue that such a meaningless existence could lead to nihilism. A brief look into the Indian Carvaka, however, suggests that although there may only be this life and only matter, that does not suggest that ethics are meaningless. In fact, because there is only the minor pains of this life, the body becomes all that much more important, as it is representative of “I” (Sarma 6). This could lead to hedonism, but considering the importance of intellection, I would argue that Aristotelian ethics are more rational. Hedonism, after all, is not always in our best interests. Self-indulgence in one area can lead to an imbalance in another. For example, it may bring me pleasure to eat a full plate of donuts, but that same act can lead to health problems in the future. Because, according to atomism, everything is matter at its core, your body is important, and so is balance. For these reasons, I argue that divine creationism and materialism result in the same conclusion in terms of ethics and the meaning of life.

The core difference between materialism and a divine creationist cosmology, such as Ibn Sina’s, is that creationists believe in a striving for something that may be achievable after death. However, materialists, like the atomists, believe that there is and all that we can know is matter. Atomism and divine creationism both have flaws. For example, atomism faces much criticism in trying to explain unified motion in the void. Creationism denies the possibility of that void. However, creationism has flaws as well. Under Ibn Sina’s theories, there seems to be a lack of free will, which leaves room for questioning the purpose of existence. In the same way, materialism can be critiqued for suggesting a seemingly meaningless existence. However, unlike Ibn Sina’s lack of free will, the meaningless existence of materialism can be reconciled by putting an emphasis on the pleasure and balance of body and soul in this material world. Atomism and divine creationism overlap in other ways at times, including in their belief in the possibility of least parts. This overlap, along with their similar arguments for ethics and meaning, reveal how these theories come from a place of common ground. In the context of their unique cultures, it is necessary to recognize the Aristotelian influence on both cosmologies, as it shows how the same foundation can lead to different conclusions. Ultimately, I argue that this foundation and the flaws and similarities of both cosmologies show the subjectiveness of inquiring about the world’s existence. At its core, cosmology is inductive, because we have no way of knowing until we die, and perhaps not even then, what the laws of this entire cosmos are. If, however, it is true that we should use our intellection to achieve pleasure, be it in this life or the next, this does not suggest that cosmology is meaningless. In fact, it may very well be our duty to try to make sense of the world.

Works Cited

Berryman, Sylvia. "Democritus." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford University,

15 Aug. 2004. Web.

Furley, David J. "The Greek Theory of the Infinite Universe." Journal of the History of Ideas 42.4 (1981): 571. Web.

Gutas, Dimitri. "Ibn Sina [Avicenna]." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford

University, 15 Sept. 2016. Web.

Hyman, Arthur, James J. Walsh, and Thomas Williams. "Ibn Sina (Avicenna), 980-1027."

Philosophy in the Middle Ages: the Christian, Islamic, and Jewish Traditions. 3rd ed.

Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2010. 239-64. Print.

Mcgibbon, Donal. "Pleasure as the "Criterion" in Democritus." Phronesis 5.2 (1960): 75-77. Web.

McGinnis, Jon. "A Small Discovery: Avicenna’s Theory of Minima Naturalia." Journal of the History of Philosophy 53.1 (2015): 1-24. Web.

McGinnis, Jon. "Avoiding the Void: Avicenna on the Impossibility of Circular Motion in a Void." Ed. Peter Adamson. Classical Arabic philosophy: sources and reception. Vol. 11. N.p.: Warburg Institute, 2007. 1-16. Print.

Pancheri, Lillian Unger. "Greek Atomism and the One and the Many." Journal of the History of Philosophy 13.2 (1975): 139-44. Web.

Sarma, Deepak. "Carvaka." Classical Indian philosophy A reader. New York: Columbia U Press, 2011. 3-13. Print.

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Grief and Its Better Alternatives by Tori Bloom

It makes little sense to define grief only in terms of sadness upon recognition of the loss of a loved one. This perspective is dismissive of the other feelings associated with grief such as anger, anguish, and regret (Goldie, 2011). Therefore, in this paper I will first address what grief is and how it can encompass this range of feelings. I also wish to present the idea that while grief involves loss, one can feel loss without grief. Through an analysis of several texts, I will argue that grief is a narrative that is saturated by a fear of mortality. This fear of mortality is the key difference between feeling loss, and more particularly sorrow, and feeling grief. Furthermore, this distinction is often overlooked in arguments concerning whether or not grief is bad. In the case of sorrow at the loss of a loved one when feelings of anger are involved they are usually aimed at the circumstances of the loss, whereas with grief the anger is directed at death itself. This difference means that sorrow allows us to more easily focus on the reality of losing our loved one, where grief separates us from reality and can have detrimental effects on the psyche, leaving us with a disposition for anger, sadness, and depression.  Based on these distinctions between grief and sorrow I intend to argue that grief is something that we should overcome and the only way to do that is to accept our own mortality and to embrace feeling sorrow as a more reasonable and healthy response to death.  

Peter Goldie (2011) presents a picture of grief that explains how the emotion can envelop a multitude of feelings and yet still be identified as a single emotion. Goldie fights the conception of emotions as episodic feelings, judgements, perceptions, or mental states and suggests that emotions are narratives. He compares pain and grief to show that emotions are not simply feelings. Where it might make sense to say that someone experienced pain for a brief moment, we would question whether or not someone could feel grief for only a moment. Grief, unlike pain, is not just a sensation. Goldie mentions some other conceptions of grief, such as Martha Nussbaum’s. She identified her grief as recognizing that someone valuable to her was dead. This conception of grief concerns Nussbaum’s judgment that the person was valuable to her own eudaimonia (flourishing and wellbeing). Goldie also presents several other accounts of emotion in less depth, but ultimately concludes that they have a similar thread. This common thread is that most philosophers identify emotions with a particular mental state or event and that they look at these emotions in the context of how they present at the time of the event. Goldie argues that emotions are actually dynamic and unfold over time and that grief, as such, is actually a process rather than a state. He gives the example of writing a check to explain this. The process of writing a check is temporal. It involves the consecutive laying of ink droplets on paper. Just by looking at a single instance where an ink droplet falls on the check we would be unable to determine if a check was, in fact, being written. Furthermore, we would not know much about the entirety of the process itself just by looking at a particular moment. Goldie argues that grief is the same. He says that grief follows a pattern that involves judgments, feelings, and actions that unfold over time. None of these things are grief in themselves, nor are they necessarily essential at a particular time, but they are a part of the process. Goldie, unlike Nussbaum, would say that someone who has realized that their loved one is dead and makes the judgment that the deceased was valuable for their eudaimonia cannot use this particular judgment itself to determine whether or not they are experiencing grief. To explain his narrative account of grief, Goldie discusses how grief impacts not just the present mental state, but our perception of the past. Take, for instance, a dinner guest who gives the host a compliment that, under the surface, is actually a slight. At first, the host may see the comment as harmless. However, upon later realization that the comment was a slight, the host no longer remembers the comment as harmless. The memory itself changes. The same is true of grief. We might, for example, remember the last time we saw a loved one as more gloomy and sad than we had perceived it as at the time. Our new knowledge and emotions actually change our memories of events. Goldie also points out that grief is not only concerned with particulars, like particular memories, but that general descriptions play a role as well. When we recall experiencing grief we do not typically define the experience as particular moment. For example, a husband who lost his wife and was grieving might recall, years later, how he would wake up and pour her a cup of coffee before realizing she was gone, or that he would stay up late and cry or have trouble falling asleep without her. We call this grief. Of course, grief relies on an event, a real loss of a loved one, the judgment of that loved one as valuable, but this is only one part of the process of grief. Goldie’s account of emotions, and particularly of grief, is unique in that it explains how it is possible that an emotion could involve different feelings. It also suggests that emotions have an effect not just on a particular mental state at an exact moment but that they can affect our past, present, and future.

While grief is a process, and therefore no one particular event can determine if grief is present, there are certain features of the emotion that differentiate it from the experience of loss without grief. Jane McCracken (2005) says that the perception of grief as a reaction to loss is not completely accurate. Grief is not simply about the loss of something, but it is an emotion that one has for the object that is lost. We say that we are angry at someone, or we love someone, but with grief we say that we grieve for someone. McCracken says that this suggests that we grieve not just for the loss, but that we do it in honor of that thing. This is what she says differentiates grief from just loss. The loss of a relationship for example, even if the separation is permanent, does not have the same sense of obligation and dedication for the lost object. McCracken points out that often, in trying to get over a lost relationship, a person’s family may remind her that the loss is not one of “life and death”. This suggests that loss in itself does not entail grief. Death, then, is intimately related to grief. In particular, when we make the initial judgment that a valued loved one has been lost we must also recognize that the loved one has been lost to death. Furthermore, we have to judge death to be a bad thing. McCracken, drawing on Donald Gustafon’s distinction between grief and sorrow, says that a daughter who is grieving for her father truly desires, despite her beliefs in what is possible, that her father was alive again. She demands that the world change the way that it is, perhaps facing denial and anger at the fact that her father died.  This desire ultimately puts her into turmoil because it cannot be fulfilled. According to Gustafon, sorrow, unlike grief, involves wishing that, for the sake of one’s happiness, the deceased person were alive. It makes no demands that the world change how it is, but only wishes that things could be different, and so sorrow does not create the same turmoil that grief does.

When a loved one passes we feel as though time should stop, and we are arrested by the hopelessness, fear, and anxiety that our conception of death brings with it (Bilimoria, 2011). Purushottama Bilimoria analyzes several philosophies concerning the loss of a loved one and the reminder of mortality. He mentions, first, Heidegger who says that the anxiety in the face of death stems from being placed in a position of the realization of becoming nothing, which is always a possibility but is then affirmed by the death of a loved one. Bilmoria also mentions Robert Solomon, who says that the fear of dying is entwined with the loss of the loved one and that, in this relationship the death of the person becomes one’s own burden. Bilimoria notes that Solomon believes grief to be a moral emotion, reflective of one’s love for their lost loved one. He says that grief is indicative of the fact that one has endured a serious loss and, therefore, it should be felt and is good. We might question the emotional health or morality of someone who does not grieve for their dead loved ones. The literature I researched, in fact, had a similar thread. Bilmoria himself argues that, in some cultures, grief and mourning allow the person who is grieving to connect to the greater community and share in the experiences. Janet McCracken (2005) said that grief is something we participate in to honor the dead’s wishes. When we cry at a funeral, for instance, we feel as though justice is being done for the deceased and in doing so we give up our grief to the dead. She argues against Gustafon’s idea that grief does not motivate action, and she says the grieving motivates people to dedicate themselves to the deceased. I do not wish to argue against the idea that grief can have benefits, such as social connection and a dedication to the dead which helps to relieve one of their grief; instead I would suggest that the benefits of grief are also found in sorrow as it relates to loss. Grief is not necessary to reap these benefits, and responding with grief is a sign of one’s judgment of death as bad, a judgment which leads to the impossible desires of grief and which make one more vulnerable to anxiety, regret, anger, and other feelings.

The distinction between grief and sorrow is where I form the basis of my account of grief as a narrative that is pervaded by the judgment that death is bad and that it should not happen to us or our loved ones. We grieve for our loved ones as though something terrible has happened to them in death, not necessarily in relation to the circumstances of their death (although that is sometimes involved). Terence O'Connell (2009) presents an analysis of the morality of death through narrative, though I will focus only on a few key points for the sake of argument. First, Terrance outlines the argument that death is deprivation of the good things in life and is therefore an evil. He says that deprivation is intrinsically evil because it involves the taking away of good things. Though it could be argued that the dead are unaware that good things have been taken from them, this does not mean the death is not evil. O’Connell argues through this narrative that life has intrinsic goods that should be sought for their own sake, so whether or not the dead person is aware that they have been deprived it is evil that the person has been deprived of what would have occurred had they not died. As I see it, O’Connell’s argument is contingent upon the idea of death as deprivation. Let’s suppose that O’Connell’s conception of death as deprivation is true. It makes no sense to conceive of death as evil for the dead because of what would have been had it not occurred. If we assume death means non-existence, how could we say that death deprives the non-existent? An apple that is destroyed cannot have anything done to it because it no longer exists. In response to this, O’Connell says that deprivation does not require existence, because we are also deprived before birth and before we come into existence. This, however, is still contingent upon existence. We cannot even fathom the notion of deprivation of something without it existing. If that were true then we might say that something which never comes into existence is deprived.  If anything, death could be argued to be evil for the living as it is the living, and not the dead, who are deprived, but ultimately this argument is contingent upon one conception of what death is. In the case of a Christian person, who is fully certain in their beliefs, they may say not to grieve for those who have died for they are in a better place. In order to defend his notion of death, O’Connell would first have to prove that death is deprivation, a task that I would argue is impossible based on the notion of the transcendent, but which I will not address here in favor of brevity. In the end his argument only stands if we claim to be certain about what happens to a person in death.

Grief is difficult to overcome as it involves the desire to change the inevitability of death (McCracken, 2005). The reality is that we do not know what happens when we die and this leaves us vulnerable to anxiety and anger. O'Connell (2009) presents another argument in his book in which he addresses death’s inevitability as consolation. Not only does he say that the inevitability of death does not provide comfort, as he believes that death is intrinsically evil, but he says that fear of death, which I have suggested is an essential judgment involved in grief, can have instrumental value in prolonging life. Concern with postponing death often helps to prevent it, such as in the case of suicide. Without concern for death, there might be no reason to put it off. I disagree with this. All we know about death is that it will happen to all mortal beings one day. We can try to think through it logically, but as of today we have yet to come up with a conception of death that is, without a doubt, true. If we allow the fear of death to pervade our reason to live, we will be bombarded by the constant anxiety of the inevitable. I may know tomorrow that I will be fired, and that there is absolutely nothing I can do to stop it. Should I avoid my boss to avoid being fired sooner rather than later? That would be irrational, as I am prolonging the inevitable for no good reason. That being said, I believe that we can both embrace the inevitability of death, and subsequently do away with grief, while also having an appreciation for life.  Life is reliable. We know that life has good things, the possibility to make memories with loved ones, happiness, sensations, love, and more. Death is unknown. It may be good, and it may be bad. This mystery is precisely why we should enjoy our reliable, good life while we have it.  

Finally, there is the question of whether or not grief itself is bad. Loretta Kopelman (1995) put forth her own perspective of grief by analyzing the arguments of other philosophers who believed that grief is either good or bad. The problem in my addressing Kopelman’s work, however, is a difference in our conceptions of what grief is. She says that normal grief begins with the realization of losing a treasured loved one, object, limb, life goal, etc. However, as I have outlined grief with its relationship to death in particular it makes little sense to critique her argument, as I am inclined to agree that it is not bad to feel sadness at the loss of a treasured person or object. However, this very difference between our definitions of grief points to a problem in the literature in differentiating between the loss of a treasured object and the loss of a treasured person. Furthermore, Kopelman does still present relevant points on the side of grief being good versus it being bad. On the side of it being bad she discusses philosophers like George Engel, John Bowlby, and Myron Hofer who argue that grief is like a wound, in that it is associated with pain, morbidity, dysfunctioning, low productivity, and more. These philosophers argue explicitly that grief is a disease. Like a disease, grief impairs the individual’s ability to function and is a pattern that can be studied and used to make predictions. Kopelman points out that this definition of disease, however, is not suitable because it makes room for things like poverty, forgetfulness, and bad manners but also does not include diseases that do not cause dysfunction, like symptomless cancer. The idea that grief is a disease because it is predictable and can be studied is also flawed, as this can applied to many things that aren’t diseases. I agree with Kopelman that grief is not actually a disease, but it is still possible that grief is bad despite this. She addresses this as well in her discussion of whether or not grief is nonmorally bad. The first question is whether grief is instrumentally bad. Certainly grief is associated with pain and loss of function and therefore might not be considered useful. However, as Darwin, Freud, and Pollock pointed out, grieving allows for a period of inactivity and adjustment to the new circumstances in order for the person to adjust to their changed world without the lost person. A period of reflection, brought on by grief, can be useful for overcoming the pain of loss. Then there is the question of whether grief is inherently bad. The contemplation of grief, Kopelman says, can actually help one in overcoming the loss and survive. Someone who does not grieve, either because they are unwilling or unable to create a new life without their treasured loved one or because they feel ambivalent toward the deceased are at risk for pathological grief. Kopelman says that the narrative of grief requires intentionality, coherence, and closure. The notion of the intentionality of grief is particularly relevant. Intentionality is involved in the placing of value in something and, in particular, the lost loved one. This is an important defense for grief, as it means that in going through the process of grieving a valued thing, the person is overcoming that loss, accepting separation, and establishing new values. If a person goes through the grieving process in the manner described by Kopelman, I do not disagree that it can be beneficial, in that it can help a person overcome loss, through reflection. Rather, it is the fixation on death and particularly the fear of it, and all of the impossible feelings of anger, denial, regret, and anxiety that come with that fixation that make grief bad. The productive part of grief is not inherent in grief itself, but in the emotion of sorrow that often accompanies it.

The difference between grief and sorrow according to my understanding is that, in grief we often direct our feelings toward both the circumstances and death itself, and in sorrow we direct our feelings toward the circumstances alone. That being said, grief often entails sorrow, but sorrow does not entail grief. We may feel sorrow over the loss of a beloved object, such as a childhood home, but any feelings of anger we have would be directed toward the circumstances of the house being destroyed and not typically destruction as some intrinsic evil. According to this understanding of sorrow, then, we might still have much of the same pitfalls that grief has including unjust anger toward oneself or others. However, in grief we feel angry at death itself for taking our loved one, as if death were a person capable of slighting us. This, unlike anger at the circumstances, has no outlet. In anger at the circumstances we can reason and say that we did not know, at the time, that we might have been able to prolong our loved one’s life. We can explain our anger toward the circumstances by trying to understand why those circumstances occurred.  Anger at death, however, has no answer. We cannot explain why death took our loved one, but we must just accept that it happened and that it was inevitable. Second, in grief we feel anxiety over our own mortality and the mortality of our loved ones. In particular, we have an irrational desire to escape an inevitable fate that we have little knowledge about. We grieve for the dead as though they are suffering, when in actuality we do not know what death is like. One might compare this anxiety to post-test anxiety. After handing in an exam, the anxiety might eat away at you. You could let it affect how you behave, whether you go out that night, if you get enough sleep, or you can simply accept that, good or bad, you cannot affect the outcome of the test. All you can do is enjoy yourself in the meantime. In grief we may go through denial, unable to accept that death could happen to our loved ones, or depression and a sense of hopelessness in the face of a fate we believe to be bad but with little evidence to support that. In sorrow sadness, depression, regret, and anger are all still possible, but they are easier to cope with because they involve the real loss and absence of the beloved person or object. Sorrow without grief allows for the person to feel and overcome the loss of their loved one without feeling anger and anxiety concerning death.

Grief is a narrative that affects the past, present, and future of the grieving person’s life (Goldie, 2011). The difference between grief and sorrow is that, while sorrow has much of the benefits of grief, grief requires the judgment that death is a bad thing that the deceased person is suffering through. I made this distinction through an analysis of what we might feel at the loss of a treasured object in comparison to a person, a distinction which is not made in much of the literature discussing whether or not grief is bad. Grief can be beneficial, allowing the grieving person to reflect upon their relationship to their lost loved one and create new values to move forward, build bonds with the greater community in certain cultures, and give up their grief to their deceased loved ones (Bilmoria, 2011; Kopelman, 1995; McCracken, 2005). However, the fixation on death can lead to anxiety about the perceived nothingness we face, as suggested by Heidegger or, as Gustafon suggested, it can lead to turmoil because the desire to overcome death is impossible. Ultimately, grief is a reflection of our misguided perception of death as bad. The truth is that we do not know whether death is good or bad, and feeling bad for those who have died and allowing that anxiety to affect the way that we view our past, present, and future can lead to frustration and, ultimately, pathological grief. For these reasons I believe that sorrow without grief is a more healthy response to loss, as it gives us an outlet, the circumstances of the death, for our feelings. Furthermore, sorrow would allow us to still show that we cared about the loss object, displaying our human capacity to love and form social bonds. In the end, the best response to death would be acceptance of the unknown and inevitable, and the impossibility of changing a past death, but a love for other people that might bring us pain when we learn that they are gone.

References

Bilimoria, P. (2011). On Grief and Mourning: Thinking a Feeling, Back to Bob Solomon.

Sophia, 50(2), 281-301. doi:10.1007/s11841-011-0257-1

Goldie, P. (2011). GRIEF: A NARRATIVE ACCOUNT. Ratio, 24(2), 119-137.

doi:10.1111/j.1467-9329.2011.00488.x

Kopelman, L. M. (1994). Normal Grief: Good or Bad? Health or Disease? Philosophy,

Psychiatry, & Psychology, 1(4), 209-220. The Johns Hopkins University Press. Retrieved

from muse.jhu.edu/article/245026.

Mccracken, J. (2005). Falsely, Sanely, Shallowly. International Journal of Applied Philosophy,

19(1), 139-156. doi:10.5840/ijap20051917

O'Connell, T. (2009). Dialogue on grief and consolation. Retrieved from

https://ebookcentral.proquest.com

[nonamememoir]

Chaos Like Me by Tori Bloom

I was in diapers until I was four years old. For whatever reason potty-training never stuck with me. One day, fed up, my mother told me that if I didn’t learn to use the potty that she would never take me camping again. I promptly ripped off my diaper and never looked back.

I don’t think of myself as an outdoors person. I like lazing about in bed all day, mostly. I don’t like the sun or the heat, and in my opinion beaches are only truly beautiful at night. I don’t like to swim much either. And still, I dream of marching across the great stretch of land between the Atlantic and Pacific.

I’m not a people person either. I’m a nervous, socially anxious, wreck. My lips work faster than my mind. I hate public speaking and job interviews. I hate introducing myself to new people. And yet, I dream of meeting strange, new, and exciting people with lives that might have never crossed mine.

If I could guess, I’d say these paradoxes arise from my early life. From the time I was eleven years old to when I was fourteen my life was chaotic. I spent those years moving from house to house, usually living with relatives, sometimes living with family friends. A bedroom of my own, where I could laze about, was never a constant. I learned to wall myself off in other ways. But sometimes I would find myself outdoors anyways, drawn to the openness, to the freedom that only my hands and feet could give me. So, maybe I am an outdoors person.

I grew up next to Williams Grove Amusement Park. The edge of our trailer park faded into the trees, and between those trees the William’s Grove miniature train snaked past. There was a bridge there, beside the track and high above the Yellow Breeches creek. I remember my friend Brittany and I, no older than seven or eight, used to walk up to that bridge and pick ripe mulberries until our fingers were dyed deep purple and our bellies were full. Every now and then the train would pass by us. We would sit on the edge of the bridge, fingers curled around inky berries, and wave to the people on the train as we stuffed our chubby faces.

Have you ever walked on train tracks that stretched over water? It’s a terrifying thing, but incredibly exhilarating. My older sister Stephanie was the first one to bring me onto train tracks. They were those amusement park tracks. I remember watching my feet move from one wooden slat to the next, peering into the water below us, just waiting for one of my tiny feet to slip through the cracks. My head would turn back now and then, watching anxiously for the train to come rolling up behind us.

When I was fourteen I moved on to bigger and more dangerous activities. My cousin Kelsey, our friend Allen, and some of his friends all decided to go on a walk along train tracks. Kelsey and I lived together at the time, so we did everything together. Everything usually meant walking around downtown California, Pennsylvania and entertaining ourselves in Dollar General. Sometimes entertainment came in the form of a vintage-style restaurant called Spuds. We would go there and order crispy bacon cheese fries and sit on stools, talking and laughing for hours. Today it meant walking on train tracks.

These train tracks were at the top of a steep hill that brushed against the Monongahela river on one side. On the other side of the hill, there was one smooth path up through the grass to get to the top. Most of us chose to climb up a particularly sharp incline of the hill, preferring the challenge.Kelsey, however, was a little more heavy set, her weight carried in her hips, so she decided it was in her best interest to take the smooth path up. Once Allen, his friends, and I made it to the top we began or walk. We watched Kelsey moving on the street, a good five feet below us, on her way to the path. Just a few feet ahead of us the track was suspended over the river. There was a stretch of solid metal to walk on connected to the tracks, a bridge over the water, but we all decided to continue on the tracks just to see if we could do it. I followed Allen and his friends’ lead, stepping out onto the wooden slats. Those train tracks were a far cry from the ones I knew at the amusement park. For one thing, they were much larger. Of course, that was because the train was larger, faster, and more powerful. It wasn’t an amusement park ride. My legs were shaking as I carefully took each step, avoiding the gaps between each wooden slat, trying not to pay attention to the pool of swirling, muddy, water peeking out between the cracks. I looked up for a moment and saw Kelsey on the other side of the bridge, moving toward us along the tracks, her dirty blonde hair a frizzy mess thanks to the humid day. She had her headphones in.

“This is freakin’ scary. Why are we doing this again?” I asked.

“I don’t know, ‘cuz we’re dumb?” Allen answered.

We were still walking over the water when we heard it. When I looked up again I could see the train barreling down the tracks, headed toward us. Kelsey had her back facing it.  

“Holy shit!” Someone shouted, and, like that was some unspoken signal, we all began running across the tracks. What had been careful steps minutes before was now sprinting, gliding from track to track. It hadn’t occurred to us that we could simply step to the right and continue on that metal bridge, instead of trying to outrun a train by running straight toward it.

“Kelsey!” We began waving our arms, trying to get her attention. Her head was down. She kept walking slowly. “Kelsey, get off the tracks! There’s a train!”

We all ran off the suspended tracks and made it back to solid ground. I fell down in the grass, panting. Kelsey stepped off of the tracks a second after that and walked over to us. The train flew by us, over that bridge, just a few seconds later.

“That was-”

“Fucking awesome!” Allen cheered. There was a chorus of laughter. “Kelsey, why didn’t you get off the tracks when we called you?”

“Oh. I didn’t hear you guys,” she told us, holding up her mp3 player.

“We thought you were gonna get hit by the train,” I said, laying back in the grass and running my hands all over my fear-flushed face.

“Oh no, I was fine, guys. I heard the train.”

We laughed harder.

I didn’t have a home growing up. When I was ten years old we left our trailer park behind and moved in with my grandparents. My Gram and Pap had lived there, in western Pennsylvania, for as long as I could remember. Now we were a part of that home, nestled in the mountains, thick forests, and winding backroads. It was, as all things in my life have seemed to be, only temporary. My older sisters, Amber and Stephanie, moved in with friends, I think. I sort of lost track of them for the next few years of my life. All of us were moving around too much, only brushing into each other at family gatherings. When I was eleven, my parents broke up. My mother and I began hopping from home to home. Somehow, somewhere along the way, I ended up on my own, living with my ill aunt and taking care of her. My mother left me and got married. My dad moved to Kentucky to live with his brother to make enough money to one day come back and take care of me. Everything, everyone, slipped out of my grasp. I couldn’t control my life, or what it had become. The only things I have always felt in control of are my hands and my feet.

With my hands I journaled. I wrote about baby birds that I saw, tucked away in their nests. Sometimes I wrote about boys or girls that I had crushes on. I wrote awful, cheesy, songs and poems. With my hands I created stories.

With my feet I walked barefoot on gravel, like my mother always used to do. My feet carried me wherever I wanted them to. I walked over bridges, through streams, down hot sidewalks and busy streets. With my feet I was free.

There was a tall tree beside our trailer growing up. I was about nine years old, coming home from school. I dropped my backpack at the bottom of the tree and grabbed onto the lowest branch, pulling myself up and over. Then I grabbed the next branch and pulled myself onto that one. I was so focused on the task at hand, and by the time I was up high enough my hands and and feet were scratched, red and raw. It didn’t hurt. I rested my back against the thick trunk, looking up at the oval-shaped, bright green clusters of leaves. I could see the sun shining through the top, yellow light radiating through the leaves and spreading spider veins over them. My head dropped again. I glanced at my house, barely visible through the leaves, and sighed. The kids at school had made fun of me that day, and that day I wasn’t quite strong enough to take it with a smile. sat there, against the tree, and let myself cry. My body shook against its great, big, trunk.

They called me names. I wasn’t Tori, I was “licehead”. The kids came up with this creative name after I spent two weeks out of school trying to get rid of the tiny little creatures making a home on my scalp. I was the girl who never got picked for kickball, even though I was good at it. I wore mismatched socks and didn’t brush my hair, so I wasn’t good enough. I brought some of it on myself, as I was a bossy child with very little social skills. I didn’t know how to make friends. I was aggressive and argumentative. But no little kid deserves to feel unwanted.

My tears fell from my cheeks, through the air and to the ground below, swirling like leaves and collecting on the dirt.

At the time I hadn’t thought that it was a strange place to cry. I know now that, although I it was unusual, this was my refuge. Climbing up, focusing on the movement of my hands and feet, the pull of my muscles, the sun glimmering through the top of the trees, gave me a moment of control. For as much as the kids at school could tease me and call me names, reject me, they couldn’t take away the green in the trees or the feeling of knotted bark under my fingertips. So I climbed, I let my pain go, and I climbed back down.

Spring semester of my junior year, my friend Patrick and I were drunk off of our asses after a night of partying. We lived in the same dorm, so we walked back from the party together. We made it all the way back to our doors when I paused, turned, and called out to him.

“Wait! I kinda want to go lay and look at the stars. Do you wanna come with?”

“Sure! Just let me get my coat.”

“Me too. I’ll meet you back out here.”

So we grabbed our coats and began walking toward the church. Patrick’s big, down, winter coat looked ridiculous, swallowing up his thin frame. He actually looked a lot like me, other than his thin frame. He had strawberry blonde hair, just like mine, but it was thinning, straight, and a shade lighter than mine. His eyes were gray-blue, darker at night, like mine. We’re both a mixture of Irish and Hungarian, but his features favor his Hungarian side, with a long hooked nose and thin lips. Patrick was a lot like me.

I met Patrick and Steph my freshman year of college. Patrick lived in my freshman dorm hall, Hanson. Steph was a year older than me. I met both of them through mutual friends, my roommate namely, and they met through me. I spent nearly every weekend with her or Patrick through all four years of my college life. We usually partied together, or went to trivia nights. Sometimes we went out to dinner, or went on walks. But my favorite memories with them both involve me breaking down into tears.

My sophomore year, I invited Patrick to polish off a bottle of gin in my room. We were laying on my bed, taking shots and talking about our lives.

“I’ve never had gin before,” Patrick commented right before he downed another shot. “It’s not too bad.” I took a shot after him and gagged. We laughed.

“I wonder what other people think about gin. Let’s google it!”

The consensus online was the gin made people sad.

“Pfft, yeah right. We’re not sad at all,” Patrick said.

Ten minutes later we were talking about our dead grandparents and crying.

There was a knock on my door. I sniffled, dried my eyes with my sleeve, and walked to the door. Our friend Jen was there. She had dropped by in the hopes that I had a cigarillo. She looked around the room, eyebrows raised.

“Is Patrick crying?”

Patrick and I looked at each other and burst into laughter.

We made it to the patch of grass by the church. There were a few other people laying in lawn chairs, smoking cigarillos and chattering. Patrick and I found a place far enough away from everyone else and plopped onto the ground.

“Have I ever shown you that I can stand on my head?” I asked him, grinning like a madwoman.

“No, I don’t think so. You can do that?”

“Hell yeah I can! Watch this!”

I got on my knees, tilted forward until my head was pressed to the ground and lifted myself up, my legs hanging in the air for a full 10 seconds before I toppled forward.

“I can do it for longer, I swear, but I’m way too drunk.” We laughed.

Patrick laid down and I sat beside him, running my fingers through the grass. After a few seconds I fell down next to him.We laid beside each other, silent, watching the stars. I was always brought back to the stars for some reason. I don’t think Patrick cared much either way, but he was drunk and went along for the ride. I kept staring up at them and something came over me, like the stars were begging me to open my mouth and not just talk but actually say something. I had been silent for way too long, stuck in my own head. I was depressed. I took a deep breath and broke the silence.

“You know my dad tried to kill himself?”

That’s one way to make conversation.

“Yeah, I know,” he answered, no judgment in his voice.

“I never understood why he hated his brother so much for going through with it. Suicide is hard. It means, like, you know,” I wiped my face with the sleeve of my coat, “Someone who kills themself thinks that things were so bad that they had no other choice. But now I get it. I get it because my dad tried to leave me, and I’m pissed. And, I don’t talk about it. I don’t ever really talk about it, but that’s how I feel. My dad, he was grieving after my aunt died and I get it, but I lost someone too.” By that point I was holding back sobs, but my body was shivering and my vision was blurry. I kept looking up at the stars, even though I could no longer see them.

“You know that I’m here for you if you ever need to talk,” Patrick told me. He turned to me and wrapped an arm around my waist.

“I know. I know. And it means a lot. Because I think about ending it too. I think about jumping in front of a train sometimes. And maybe that’s something that came out of this, something good; I could never do it because I know what it feels like to lose someone. And, and I don’t want my dad to go through that, or my sisters, or you and Steph. You guys make me feel important.”

“You are important.”

We went quiet again and I looked back up at the sky and the stars and held them there, for a moment, in my memory.

*

I

(a short poem by Tori Bloom)

“I can’t remember

When I laughed

So hard I nearly cried.

When I watched the stars

And noticed

That it was only I.”

*

It was a warm fall night, one of the last memorable ones that I had with my friend Steph before she graduated. We had drank way too many bottles of Henry’s hard orange soda, followed up by some cider we had stolen from the communal fridge. It was around 2 a.m. and, although I usually went back to my dorm around that time, I asked her if she wanted to go on a walk. She agreed, and we were off. I was practically dancing on the sidewalks, gliding smoothly. In reality I probably looked like a drunken, stumbling fool.

“You know what I wanna do when I graduate?” I slurred. “I wanna go! Just, go! Like, I keep telling people that I want to pack a bag and just start walking and they act like I’m crazy. Is that crazy?”

Steph laughed and shook her head a little, brown hair flopping in the wind. “Yeah, a little. Most people start working on their careers when they graduate. But I can see why you’d want to travel. I want to travel too.”

“I get that. But it’s like, my whole life I’ve been told to just keep going. A lot of us are told that— you know, fake it till you make it? And it sucks! It fucking sucks. We’re all gonna die one day so what’s the point? Why not just do what I wanna do? I don’t wanna find some shitty job, just so I can get experience to get another shitty job and have kids and a husband and teach them to be miserable too.”

We came to the end of the alley we were stumbling through and made it back to the sidewalk along Carlisle street. We turned toward the town square and stood for a moment, starstruck by the glowing lights on the Christmas tree in the middle of town.

My favorite memory with Steph was also sophomore year. We came back to my dorm after a night of drinking. I suddenly felt extremely dizzy and stumbled into my bathroom, sitting at the toilet. The next thing I knew, a waterfall was spilling from my mouth. I started to cry, my emotions overwhelming me as the alcohol swirled around in my brain. Steph walked into the bathroom and handed me a glass of pedialyte mixed with water. I lifted my head up from the toilet seat and took a sip, only to immediately spit it back out into the toilet.

“Is there vodka in that?” I gasped, feeling sick all over again. Steph took the cup from me.

“Yeah. It seemed like a good idea at the time,” she informed me. I was laughing, but tears were still stinging my eyes. I puked again.

I started to whine incoherently about my mom, about how abandoned I felt, and how depressed I was. Steph rubbed her hand on my back.

“What do you want me to do?” she asked, trying to soothe me.

“Can you play One Direction? Play Take Me Home by One Direction! That’ll make me feel better.”

She brought my laptop into the bathroom and began to blast that album. We both sung along, messing up all of the words, crying and smiling at the same time.

We were on the move again, heading toward the town circle.

“Which way should we go?”

“This way!” I pointed to the right and we continued our journey.

Something in me, maybe the booze, maybe something else, pulled me into the street. I started skipping, gesturing for Steph to join me. She hesitated, pushed her glasses up on the bridge of her nose, and shrugged before she walked out into the street too. We laughed as we ran through the empty streets.

“This is so stupid!”

And it was stupid, but also unforgettable.

***

I was about nine years old. My family and I were on our yearly camping excursion. I woke up in the early afternoon and everyone was sitting around the simmering campfire. They were trying to get the flames going, but the sizzling crack of the wood and the pillar of smoke weaving between the trees was a sign that all of the wood had been soaked in the rain the night before. The sky was still gray, but there was a slight glow peeking out from behind the clouds, glinting off of the leaves in the nearby woods.

“I wanna go to the park,” I announced, walking over to my younger cousins, Kelsey and Julie.

“Oh, we just got back from the park,” Julie told me, not moving from her seat by the fire.

I was hurt, as though their trip to the park was a betrayal of the very worst kind. To a child, it might seem that way.

“Fine, I’ll go by myself. Is that okay, mom?”

My mom gave me the go-ahead and I was off. I marched through the woods, toward the giant slabs of stone, organized like a bunker in the woods. I climbed on top of one of the slabs and looked out through the spaces between the trees. I could still see my family, blobs shifting around in the distance as they moved around the campsite. I climbed back down and headed toward the park.

When I got there, the first thing I did was climb onto the tire swing. I spun in circles, staring up toward the sky and laughing, alone. Except, I wasn’t really alone because I had imaginary friends. One of those friends was a girl named Sarah, a mean blonde who I rarely actually got along with. The first time I imagined her I was only five years old. She sat by me on the bus, because no one else would. Sarah became my crutch, someone who calmed me down and made me brave. We shared a pet bear cub named Tootsie. They both stood beside me as I swang, just watching me twirl around until my stomach was twisted up in knots.

I climbed out of the tire swing and moved to the seesaw. Sarah got on the other side and I began pushing myself up and plummeting back down. I didn’t get very high off of the ground because my imaginary friend weighed a measly zero pounds.

“Sarah, come on! You’re not even trying to seesaw with me,” I complained. Sarah rolled her eyes at me and that was that. “You know what? I don’t wanna be friends with you anymore. Tootsie likes me better anyways. Just go, go away! I never want to see you again!” And she left. I watched her walk off, in my mind, and I didn’t try to stop her. I needed her to go.

I don’t think I ever played with ‘Sarah’ again after that. My imaginary friend was gone. Although, I suppose, she was never really a friend to begin with, just someone to be there for me when I didn’t want to do things alone.

There’s something about the wild, about railroad tracks and mulberry bushes, starlit nights and trees, that opens me up, even when I don’t want to. I feel free running from trains and falling into the grass. I feel connected to my past, to the days that I walked with my sister in our trailer park and when I used to climb the tree beside our home. When I run down empty streets I feel opportunity that I have never found in the pages of a textbook. Because railroad tracks, fields of green grass, the moon hanging low in the sky, the trunk of a tree decades older than me, none of those things care about my day. They don’t even care about my existence. And still, I exist, at this exact moment in time— at the same time that stars light years away are exploding into brilliant light, and rivers are flooding and changing course, and mountains are literally moving beneath our feet. Nature is chaotic, but it is beautiful chaos, organized chaos, chaos like me. Through the years, I’ve felt chained, out of control, a slave to my own mind and body, but when I lift myself up with my hands and feet, feeling the world around me, experiencing it as it exists right now, I am free.