I got my first ever book from Interlibrary Loan this week! (And a piece of carrot cake. Though it’s not my first piece of carrot cake.)
It’s Shy Radicals by Hamja Ahsan, and it had to be retrieved all the way from Trinity College Library in Hartford, Connecticut! I was very surprised that there were zero copies anywhere in the NYPL system. Based on the condition of the spine, I think I might be the second or so person to check it out.
The Facebook page of an organization called The Other 98% shared this meme to its 6.9 million followers a few weeks ago.
[Image reads “A scientist will read dozens of books in his lifetime, but still believe he has a lot more to learn. A religious person will barely read one book and think that they know it all.”]
It’s not the first time and it won’t be the last that I’ve objected to such memes denigrating the integrity or intelligence of religious people. I think it’s wrong in and of itself to callously misrepresent huge, huge swaths of people who’d consider themselves religious. I think it’s politically dangerous to conflate religious belief or observance generally with literalist fundamentalism. To effectively say to the fundamentalists, “Yes, yes, you are right—your interpretation of Christianity is in fact the only real and genuine one.” I think the real function of other memes of this family is to cut off younger, progressive/left-leaning people from knowledge of and the possibility of alliance with progressive religious people who actually have a long history of engaging in civil disobedience and working for justice and human rights, or reform within their own religious traditions.
And it’s so easy to refute, superficially, and so tempting to attempt to do so by noting religious people we all know who love books and reading, who live in houses full of books, are curious about the world, and don’t see any conflict between their faith and their love of knowledge.
That mystery is something actually essential to the faith of many people in many faith systems.
That the position that the Bible is the single, sufficient source of all human knowledge (and not just the authoritative text of our faith system) is the position of inerrancy or of literal fundamentalism, and that neither Catholicism nor any of the mainline Protestant denominations believe this or teach it.
That many, many scientists and scholars, including giants in their fields, have been religious people, and that most religious traditions simply do not devalue science and the humanities this way.
Literally that the Jesuit order exists.
That the meme is terribly Christocentric—that other faiths don’t necessarily have the same kind of relationship to a single text that Christians have to the Bible, even liberal and non-literalist Christians. Some are more reliant on oral traditions, some have many texts, some have none. But if your faith system doesn’t work basically like Christianity, with a huge amount of reverence centered on a single book? Must not be a real religion! (///sarcasm, obviously, I hope.)
Though I suppose the meme does leave open the question of which single book I must think contains the answers to every question I might ever have, since it technically doesn’t specify. Maybe it’s House of Leaves!
[Part of a bookshelf belonging to a religious person who has probably barely read a single one of these in her entire life.]
That even to become a Christian seminarian requires reading so many books. I’ll never forget my pastor in college telling me that the hardest part of seminary was that it was actually temporally impossible to do all of the assigned reading.
But something else struck me about this meme the more I looked at it, that I think probably flies under a lot more people’s radar.
Which is that it isn’t just misleading about religious people and what it means to be religious.
It’s misleading about science. About what science is, how science works, and what it means to be a scientist, or what it takes to become one.
A scientist, suggests the meme, is someone who reads “dozens” of books, who asks questions that contradict religious dogma, and who rejects the answers, the truth, the certainty, about how the world works supposedly contained in the Bible. It’s weirdly simplistic and almost totally disconnected from any understanding of how science is done or what makes someone a scientist, which is, to say the least, not really a book-based process.
And it’s bordering on being a Christian fundamentalist’s caricature of what a scientist is.
“The Mission of The Other 98% is simple but bold: To be a storytelling force that educates people and stirs them to fight for justice,” reads the Other 98%’s profile on Guidestar.
But what is the “storytelling” force of this meme? What’s the narrative it’s crafting? In what way is it educating people to motivate them to fight for justice?
Why does it take the form of a pair of statements that are almost comically misleading about both science and religion?
Who made this meme, anyway? Can you tell?
What does someone want who is propagating statements with the effect of separating you from knowledge of the very existence of religious progressives or even non-Christians among your political allies?
And what interest would a supposedly progressive social media page have in misleading you about science in a way that strangely mimics Christian fundamentalist rhetoric on that subject?
Is whoever created this meme genuinely this ignorant about how both of those fields work? If so, why are we taking them seriously? If not, what is the possible function or purpose of this meme other than to confirm some number of people’s pre-existing prejudices about those subjects?
In 2017 it was found that in the run-up to the 2016 Presidential election, Tumblr, among other social media networks, had been extensively infiltrated by blogs originating with the Internet Research Agency, a Russian troll farm, whose aim was to proliferate anti-Clinton and anti-voting sentiment among young American progressives and leftists. It did this by masquerading as a network of anti-racist and Black Lives Matter blogs, adopting a certain amount of rhetoric associated with the BLM movement in order to gain confidence while sowing anti-voting cynicism as a component of that movement, which was then uncritically spread by other naïve and well-meaning bloggers who considered themselves allies of the BLM movement.
(While I’d suspected some of the allegedly anti-racist rhetoric being introduced was not in good faith, I thought it might be coming from American white supremacist groups. Some of it seemed like it just couldn’t have been better designed to fracture communities and effective political alliances.)
Now, do I really believe that The Other 98% is secretly a Russian anti-voting operation, or a front organization for a hidden pack of Christian fundamentalists or white supremacists? No; it’s a registered 501c(4) organization, and you can look up its 990 forms and find out who its leaders are.
But when a piece of rhetoric like this mainly has the possible effects of reinforcing simplistic prejudices not just about religious people, but about what scientists do and how science is done, and inhibiting the formation of effective alliances, then yes, I am dubious about where it came from, who created it and why, and how it cleared whatever process exists (or possibly doesn’t) for approving content on the Other 98%’s social media pages.
Because how well can you defend science if you don’t have a clue what science actually entails? Or mobilize to fight for justice with people for whom you either have contempt, or who you don’t think exist?
I’ve been feeling a little taken aback by the lack of comment on the three-year anniversary of the start of the pandemic this past week. I mean, I know we’re all tired of hearing about it, of thinking about it. Maybe it’s just that everyone feels like what could possibly be said has been said. But it feels somehow more significant to me than the second, or even the first, when we were still very, very much in the worst of it than we are now.
Three years since the world just stopped. Since I got a last drink with a friend at my favorite bar, had a last shift at work before they called off the rest of the school year, bought a last book at our local bookstore because there was a real chance, within the next day or two, that I wouldn’t be able to for a long, long time.
I sit finishing a cup of coffee by the back window of my apartment, where I watched so much of the past three years go by. It’s quiet out now, mostly because people are at work, or working from home, not huddled in their apartments afraid of dying by breathing the air outside. Strangely I remember those first days as so noisy, even though the streets were empty. Other people say they remember the constancy of the ambulance sirens. I remember the constant phone calls, text message notification chimes, news on the radio, Governor Cuomo’s daily press conferences, the inescapable sounds of three people more or less trapped in a tiny apartment together, of people moving out as other residents fled the building. Of a crescendo of fear and anxiety more than any literal sound.
I wore my noise canceling headphones more or less constantly at home once my roommates got up in the mornings and before they both left town for the duration of that spring and summer. I’d taken to getting up at 6:00 AM not only to go outside for a walk before there were almost any other humans in the park, but just to get a couple of hours of quiet to read in before the rest of the building woke up.
It’s quiet now. Trees with reddish buds are starting to wake, giving a faint rosy glow to the afternoon. The park is just barely veiled in pale green. The sky is bright cornflower blue. Starlings and chickadees are singing.
I won’t say things feel more normal this year, but they feel different. Quieter.
A few weeks ago Nicole Chung answered a letter in her Care and Feeding column at Slate from a mother who was concerned about her 17-year-old daughter’s professed ambition to become a writer. And I think Nicole gave a great answer—indeed, she touched upon one of my own favorite soapboxes: the value of artistic and creative work as work. And yet there are a couple other things I think that many parents and teachers of soon-to-be college-aged kids, who are worried about those kids’ eventual ability to earn a living, could stand to take a deep breath and hear.
First off–and the older I get, the more convinced I am that this is true–there is absolutely no necessity whatsoever to know or decide when you’re 17 what you want to do for the rest of your working life, or to be right about it.
I’ve been a big proponent of kids learning to tell what their strengths are, what their environmental “niche” is, so to speak, and I still am. I think this is a crucial skill for disabled kids in particular. I also think, especially when kids are identified as gifted or considered extremely talented, there can be a lot of pressure for them to figure out what their “gift” is very young, and to achieve highly in that thing. And some people absolutely do.
But really, most people take a much more meandering path to where they feel they really belong. And even that doesn’t have to stay the same thing forever. Life’s a long song, in the words of Jethro Tull.
When I was 17, I thought I knew what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, and I wasn’t right, but I was actually in the right ballpark.
When I was 19, I did decide what I wanted to do, and that is more or less what I still do, and that puts me among a minority of people my age, for whom starting our working lives in one job, or even career field, and ending them in the same one, is no longer the norm. I could change careers now (I have no plans to, but I could), and still have had an entire career in theater…and still have time to go and have an entire career in something else.
People I know have left stage management to become chefs, lawyers, youth advocates, or just to do something else in the performing arts world, and that doesn’t mean the time they spent before was wasted or that they weren’t where they were supposed to be. We all carry a lot of different experiences and perspectives into the jobs we do from other parts of our lives, and that can actually make us better at them, whether we’re coming to creative work from a different field, or leaving it for one. Better collaborators, more knowledgeable about what other people may be going through, less clueless about life outside our own training.
If LW’s daughter tries being a writer and ultimately can’t make it work, or makes it work for a while but decides to do something else, that doesn’t mean she was wrong to try.
In the second place…there are so many jobs you don’t even know exist. And that her high school teachers and counselors don’t even know exist or know how to clue her in about. And I talk about this a lot in light of my own experience: that people get queasy when a kid says they want to be in theater or music or dance, but being a performer themselves isn’t the only way to make that work. Because every single production doesn’t just have actors or dancers or musicians and a director; they have stage managers, composers, deck hands, designers, production managers, company managers, props artisans, dressers, load-in crew, and box office staff. Sometimes even child guardians, caterers, vocal or dialect coaches, intimacy coordinators, fight choreographers, and physical therapists.
Performing arts schools have administrative assistants, electricians, orchestra librarians, technical directors, recording engineers…you get my drift.
Lots of us start out entranced by the possibility of being a performer but don’t take very long to learn our actual calling is in a support or production role.
So maybe LW’s daughter wants to pursue being a writer, but in the process finds out more about all the possibilities that exist in the publishing industry or a related field, and that one of those might be where she really belongs. Firsthand, background knowledge of the craft of writing will be an asset to her, like having some firsthand, background knowledge of what acting entails and what it means to be an actor is to my ability to do my job well, even though I’m not one. The time I spent thinking I might want to be was far from wasted.
(And of course maybe she’ll be successful as a writer, because your artistic capability when you’re 17 isn’t the sum total of all you’re allotted for life.)
Third…and this is something I feel like we don’t hear people say enough, or at all:
It is perfectly okay to decide that something is too hard, or too much work, to be worth it to you to spend your life pursuing it at all costs.
“The math is too hard” is a perfectly valid reason not to pursue an education in something you don’t even want to be doing in the first place.
I think there’s absolutely value in pursuing what you want despite hardship. There’s also a difference between something being hard but surmountable with time and effort in a way that’s worth it to you, and hard because it’s fundamentally mismatched with your actual strengths and desires.
Most things worth working for are hard in some respect, but it’s also possible for something to be too hard, because in fact you’re not cut out for it at all. That’s nothing to be ashamed of; that’s an almost unavoidable consequence of human diversity. People aren’t good at all the same things, or want to do all the same things, and we actually need that to be true.
“It takes all kinds of brains to make a better world,” Sonia Boué writes.
Is doing something that’s likely to make you miserable for the rest of your career an acceptable outcome of not doing something you actually want to be doing? Is the chance at working at something you actually want to get better at, or the chance to find out something else you’d rather be doing entirely, an acceptable cost of doing that amount of work at something that’s too hard or hateful to you?
LW is writing as if the things her daughter wants to do have costs, but the things she wants her daughter to do don’t, and that’s just not true.
Time and effort expended on something she doesn’t like or want to do is time and effort not available to spend doing or discovering something she actually might be better at.
Something we’re thankfully starting to talk more about in autism advocacy is that part of the problem with intensive behavioral training programs to coerce kids into adopting more typical-looking ways of moving, playing, and socializing, isn’t just that the therapy itself is ineffective or abusive. It’s also that kids are being cost time and energy to rest, play, explore the world on their own terms, spend time with special interests or developing genuine talents, participating in other extracurricular activities with peers, or even just goofing off. We cost kids more genuine chances to become skillful, or to be successful with peers, when we insist on only a narrow range of acceptable success.
Yeah, sure, on paper being an electrical engineer or IT specialist might be more stable or better paid than being a writer, but how good or successful at those things is it possible to be if the endeavor makes you miserable?
And the thing I eventually found that I wanted to be doing and that I’m also good at—I never would’ve found it if I hadn’t, briefly, been wrong about what I really wanted to do, because pursuing that thing is actually what put me in the right place at the right time to learn that the career I still have was even an option.
Trying to pursue something I was worse at because it paid better was never going to.
I don’t think everyone needs to be in love with their job. But something you actively want to be doing is easier even when it’s hard, than something that’s both intrinsically hard and that you don’t even want to be doing.
Why is this the life that so many parents seem to want for their kids?
Last year, New York Senator Jabari Brisport and Assemblyman Harvey Epstein introduced “Andre’s Law” to the New York legislature in order to ban the state of New York from continuing to send disabled residents to an out-of-state institution, the Judge Rotenberg Center, which is the only such facility in the nation to utilize electric shock as a form of behavioral conditioning and punishment.
Sadly, the bill died before being passed when the legislature went on recess for the year.
Andre’s Law has now been reintroduced in the New York State legislature; below is an adaption of my letter to my state Senator and Assemblyman asking for their support for the bill.
You can read more about the call to action to pass Andre’s Law here.
***
Dear [my New York state Senator/Assemblymember],
I’m an autistic resident of New York, and a voter in your district. I’m writing to you ask you to support the passage of Andre’s Law (Assembly Bill A.1166/Senate Bill S900) in order to prevent New York from sending any more of our residents with disabilities to the Judge Rotenberg Center, an abusive residential institution in Massachusetts, at state expense.
The Judge Rotenberg Center is the only residential institution in the nation to use electric shock as punishment on disabled residents, a disproportionate number of whom are people of color. While some parents view this treatment as vital for control of aggressive behavior or self-injury, former residents have testified to being shocked in response to harmless behavior such as refusing to take off a coat or “tensing” their bodies. The practices of this institution led to former resident Andre McCollins, for whom the bill is named, being shocked 31 times in a single day, leading to lasting trauma. Other reported abuses at the facility include food deprivation, restraint, and seclusion.
My fellow disabled New Yorkers, including those with the most intense behavioral support needs, deserve better than this.
Please vote in support of Andre’s Law to prevent any more New York youth with disabilities from being abused out of state at our expense.
Chavisory's Notebook 