WE TELL OURSELVES STORIES IN ORDER TO LIVE

I sometimes think of legacy. Not in terms of money but more a concern about what I am leaving behind for my children, for my students, maybe for the world. This is not a new phenomenon for me. Always a self-serious little girl, I focus— overly dramatically, I have long realized— on the big questions. I remember riding my bike when I was nine, stopping on the little pier overlooking Pine Lake, looking at the lake and wondering if I deserved to live. For some reason, I decided that if I could think of one good act I had done for someone else, not for self-aggrandizement or praise but simply and generously to help that other person, then I would deserve to live. If not, I would throw myself off the pier and be drowned in Pine Lake. In fact, the pier was certainly no more than five feet above the water. I was an excellent swimmer, and the water was between three and maybe four feet deep at that particular place. All that would have happened is that I would have scrapped my legs, gotten wet and had to explain to my down-to-earth Midwestern mother what in the world was going through her daughter's melodramatic head. Fortunately for all concerned, I thought of one good deed. I cannot now recall what that deed was but it was as if a box were checked. “Am I a good person, worthy of living? Check! Asked and answered. Move on to the next thing.” The tendency to think about myself in the universe and where I stand thus is not a new one.

A far more modest variant of that question perhaps remains relevant here, as at the beginning of any book: what do I have to say in this book that is of any interest to anyone else?

I have learned a few things over the years, especially about writing and teaching. First, many of us write for ourselves. We write to help us puzzle out and understand what is going on around us, to realize what just happened, to discover what sense we can in a world that too often confounds.

At one point my younger son, Nicholas, wanted to be a writer. He is just graduating from law school as I write this—two weeks in fact till his graduation—specializing in intellectual property law, so possibly he will end up being a writer well versed in the legal issues surrounding publishing his own books and stories. Nik does love science fiction, especially what he tells me is science fiction fantasy. Mothers try to be close to their children by understanding what their children love and I would occasionally ask Nik—who majored in creative writing at UCLA (the University of California, Los Angeles )—to suggest books he thought I might enjoy. I got some great suggestions that way, in fact, so this is a general policy I can recommend.

One night while Nik was still living at home, he found a book for me to read and placed it on the floor outside my bedroom door. I picked it up as I staggered into bed around 1:00 a.m., thinking I would read a bit before drifting off to sleep. I started the story, which was well written and engaging. I was already exhausted by a busy day and hence perhaps exhibited even less than my usual level of alertness to detail, so I perhaps missed a few of the telltale signs. But when I got to the part where the grandfather's tentacles stretched out, I thought, “What? This is odd.” As I read on, I realized Nik had given me a science fiction story. I was not amused!

Nik was then a high school water polo player who had to be up, fed and in the chilly water of the outdoor pool at University High School by 6:00 a.m., even in the middle of December. The next morning, after he had gone to school and I had time I read more in the book, I changed my mind. The book turned out to be a compilation of science fiction stories; one by Octavia Butler I found especially intriguing. More autobiography than science fiction, Butler's work posed a question that resonated for me when she told how she is frequently asked why a Black woman would write science fiction fantasy.

My daughter Chloe and her friend Nicole were playing one afternoon when the subject of ethnic background arose. Both girls went to Turtle Rock School but Nicole was in a different classroom than Chloe, so her class had not yet done the ancestry study where students trace their family trees. Nicole was interested in the topic, nonetheless.

“Chloe's a mutt,” I told Nicole.

“What's a mutt?” Nicole demanded, her 11-year-old mind not familiar with the concept.

“It means she's got a lot of different nationalities roaming around her background. Part Greek from her daddy's father. English and Scots from his mother. And just about everything from Northern Europe plus a teeny bit of Cherokee on my side.”

Nicole thought about this a moment.

“You’re a mutt, too,” I continued.

Now Nicole was paying close attention. “How do you know that?” she quickly demanded.

“Because I know your mother's mother is French and your dad is part English and part German.”

Nicole's face froze, her retort sharp and indignant.

“My father is NOT German! He's art history! He's chair of the department!”

Raised in an academic ghetto, by a father who indeed was chair of the art history department and a mother who was both an art history professor and associate dean of humanities, Nicole's outraged protest reflected her particular worldview, her knowledge of what was important for academics’ kids: academic disciplines. Nicole did not care a hoot about ethnic, racial, religious, or national backgrounds. But little Nicole, so seldom party to the social science dinner table conversations that too often bored Chloe, as a child of a political scientist and a lawyer, illustrates several important concepts that all academics and, indeed the populace as a whole, should incorporate into their discussions of race, ethnicity and group politics more generally: the concept of moral salience, which I define as the psychological process by which differences between people and groups become deemed ethically and politically relevant. Doing so will have profound effects on our discussions of differences. It will heighten our awareness of the social construction of the political and moral significance of differences, and reveal how the framing of our discussions of such differences will shape prejudice, discrimination and the treatment of such different groups.

Autograph books hit Lanham School when I was in 5th grade. All the girls had them. Mine was small enough to hold in one hand and had pastel-colored pages: green, yellow, blue and pink, if memory serves. Mostly the inscriptions were eminently forgettable and sappy. “Roses are red, violets are blue; no one loves you like I love you. Judy, your best friend forever.” Or else they were annoyingly uninspired and distinctly puerile, not funny except in the warped way of the young preteen mind. “Roses are red and violets are blue. You have a big head but I still like you. Ha ha ha,” the equivalent of today's LOL.

In a rash moment, I asked my mother to sign my book. (Just on the off chance that I might forget her??) Mother took the book, kept it overnight and then returned it to me with what seemed at the time an extremely odd poem. A real poem, not the “roses are red” variety I’d come to expect, and one I had never read before.

I didn't appreciate it, or even fully understand the poem at the time. But Mother's message stuck, as much a curse as a blessing.

I know now that passion is important in life. Loving someone or something more than reason dictates is a great gift. Just having that moment, in whatever form that fleeting instant takes, is transfigurative. It carries us out of ourselves and connects us with something akin to the divine.

TEACHING ETHICS THROUGH STORIES

We can define ethics— or moral philosophy; the two terms are often used interchangeably— as the moral principles that govern our behavior, the study or the branch of knowledge that asks how we ought to live. There are many ways to teach ethics. Instructors frequently lecture about the great works, describing the critical texts that address major themes in ethics, introducing the student to the canon: Plato, Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, Machiavelli, social contract theorists, moral sense theorists, Utilitarians, virtue ethics and so on. Ethics is often also taught via religious instruction, in which students discuss the messages and values of various religions, from the Abrahamic Judaism, Christian and Islam to non-Western religions, such as Buddhism, Confucianism, Hinduism or the myriad other names given to faith by various groups over the centuries. Another approach emphasizes the Socratic dialogue; here students are posed hypothetical situations and asked to work their way through important moral issues. Is it always wrong to lie? Most of us would initially say yes. But what if the Nazis come and ask if Jews are hidden in your home? Would lying be the ethical thing to do then? Or, to consider another complex ethical situation, should society expend thousands of dollars to keep alive one premature baby or an elderly person, soon to die anyway, or instead spend the money on mosquito netting to keep alive hundreds of other small children? How do you decide this question if you are a Utilitarian? A Kantian? If it is your child? Your parent?

Each of these approaches carries value and worth. But this book takes another tack. It introduces the student to ethics through the use of stories. In particular, we ask how people use stories to weave thoughts about their lives into the moral choices they confront. Where do we get our moral values? Our ethical beliefs? How much of it comes from the stories we are read as children, the books we later read ourselves, the shows we watch on TV, or via novels, plays and short stories, such as those in Aesop's Fables? By the narratives created by adults to explain critical events in our lives, such as the death of a grandparent or a divorce?

Memo

To: Wretched, Slacker Disney Child

From: Stealth Bomber Mom

Re: Advice to parents

Date: Fall 2013

I first encountered the feeling of failure as a mother when my oldest son hit kindergarten. Alex was a bright and independent little boy. When we were living in faculty housing at Princeton, a 2-year-old Alex went to the communal Halloween party wearing the sweater Nani had knitted him out of Icelandic wool. In the midst of ghosts, goblins and pumpkins, Alex stood out. One mother asked with puzzlement about my son's costume.

“He's dressed as an Icelandic eccentric,” I replied, recognizing even then that this young man was going—always—to be his own person. The trait held and Alex remains bright, lovable and totally his own man, partly unmindful of the extent to which he deviates from norms and expectations, partly exalting in his difference, and enjoying the slight flaunting of authority. It is a trait he inherited from his maternal grandfather in spades, and one encouraged by both his doting parents. (On his college essay Alex took the opportunity to inform the admissions office at the University of Chicago that he found their questions “stupid and boring” and that he would write the question they should have asked and answer that one instead. Thank you very much!)

For the most part, I was quite comfortable with this behavior. I had a far different reaction one day when I picked up Alex from kindergarten, however, and realized all the children had drawn caterpillars and placed them around the room. Each caterpillar's face was extensively decorated and featured the child's name in big, bold, colorful letters. A segment was added to the child's caterpillar for every book the child read. The school was one for gifted children—though once it moved through its scruffy start-up stage it became more a school for children with financially-gifted parents—and many of the children were quite busily reading at home, usually under the supervision of adoring mothers. The links on some of the caterpillars were impressive. As was Alex's caterpillar. Impressive for its one teeny segment: one book and only one book.

Like most offsprings of academics, my children have grown up frequenting scholarly conferences. A 3-month-old Alexander nursed in Rio de Janeiro and slept through a band playing the Brazilian national anthem at his first meeting of the International Political Science Association. As he neared his first birthday, Alex practiced walking up and down the steps of the Palmer House in Chicago during meetings of the Midwest Political Science Association; he attended later meetings while he was in high school, and was thrilled when two attractive, young, female graduate students from Oxford asked if he were writing his dissertation yet. .

Nik went on several job interviews with me. He freaked out an elderly faculty member who wasn't quite sure he was ready for a breast-feeding colleague, and was dragged to Lund, Sweden, as a teenager, not quite sure he still wanted to travel with his parents.

But it was Chloe who took in the most travel, happily logging the miles with her parents as she became an academic conference baby. In Chloe's case, the acronym was ISPP-baby, for the International Society of Political Psychology.

During this time, I should note, it was never clear who was really in charge. My academic conferences may have set the venue, but it was Chloe who defined the vacations. There was the ice cream and aquarium tour of Northern Europe. This was the year the ISPP met in Berlin, but we remember it as time structured around Chloe's love of sea urchins, dolphins, porpoises and whales. We saw every fish in every aquarium in Northern Europe, and Chloe suckered her parents into ice cream every chance she got. The ice-cream part of the tour climaxed in Norway when, after taking the night train from Oslo to Bergen, we were so exhausted we took turns sleeping and touring with Chloe during that first day. At dinner that night, as Chloe asked for ice cream for dessert, I said, “This will make twice today. You had ice cream this afternoon after the aquarium, remember?”

“Ice cream with Mom?” my husband demanded. “You had ice cream with me this morning!”

Chloe returns this weekend for college and Thursday is my last class with a wonderful group of students. I shall miss all of them. It's always sad to say goodbye to students, people who were strangers at the beginning of the term but who—in many cases—became friends as the quarter progresses. Saying goodbye to my daughter and to these students makes me think about what I am giving them as they go out into the world and whether I have done for them what I should to equip them against all the things that can—that will—befall them. Have I done my job, as a mother and as a teacher?

As I was pondering this question, I ran across a poem about teaching that I would like to share with you in this last lecture as we say goodbye. One of the reasons I like the poem is that it reminds me of the kind of books I poured over during my summers spent with my grandparents in Walnut. These were not great literature by any means, consisting mostly of stories and poetry out of date even then, school textbooks in many cases, filled with the kind of material my grandparents were required to memorize in school and, in this instance anyway, oozing all the sentimentality and Christian religion that dominated the American educational system at the turn of the nineteenth–twentieth centuries, when my grandparents were young. (In fact, the poem was published by Glennice L. Harmon in 1948.) Despite its slightly sappy overtones, I decided to share it with you, my students in what has been an exceptionally rewarding class for me, since I often find it easier to speak of deep feelings through someone else rather than expressing them directly. So here is the poem, with apologies for the syrupy sentimentality.

Chloe has a child's painting in her bedroom, hanging on the wall where Chloe can see it as she lies in bed and falls asleep at night. The painting is of a large red heart, with big turquoise letters saying: “I love my BFF.” It was painted by her best friend, Nicole and the letters BFF stand for Best Friends Forever. Nicole gave it to Chloe when the girls were quite young. I don't remember the precise date.

Chloe first met Nicole at the red park, so named because of the large red jungle gym in the play area. The girls were six, and life was simple and easy. Uncomplicated. Irvine is a pediocracy, organized around children, and life on the campus of the University of California at Irvine provided us with that mythic 1950s neighborhood, where youngsters could play unsupervised without fear of danger.

Over the years, Chloe and Nicole were in and out of each other's homes. They alternated dinners as they grew older, one Friday night with Nicole's family, one with ours. We had a series of “little girl Thanksgivings” with Nicole's family, one year at their home, one chez nous. (Nicole's mother made the best flourless chocolate cake ever.) The girls always were together in the mornings at Turtle Rock School, their closeness and rapport so strong even the teachers noted it. To this day, I am occasionally asked by one of Chloe's former teachers, when we happen to meet, how Chloe and her little friend Nicole are doing.

The girls took dancing lessons together at the local dance academy. Each spring, I had the pleasure of putting on their makeup for their recitals and practices, when beautiful little girls were transformed into miniature streetwalkers, with painted faces and rouged cheeks. Nicole has thick red lips and pale eyebrows with profuse platinum hair, to dye for, Chloe's father used to quip. Chloe is also blonde, but her hair is more honey blonde and not so thick. She has long, dark eye lashes that make me jealous.

They loved their dance classes—tap, modern, ballet; I think they must have taken everything except possibly hip-hop—and there was a period of several years when the girls would get together and draw up elaborate schedules for what they called their beanie baby dancing school.

It's odd, the things that pop into our minds in a crisis. When the doctor called to tell me the biopsy had been positive and that I had breast cancer, the first two thoughts that flashed through my mind were: “I’ve never had a calico cat!” and “I want to be buried in Walnut.” Fortunately for me, my cancer was DCIS, ducal carcinoma in situ. Effectively, these little stage-zero cancer cells are precancerous cells, akin to 10-year-old kids who want to be gang members but don't quite know how to do it.

“They’ll dress up like what they think gang members look like and will try to mimic their acts but they don't really know how to do it,” the doctor told me. “But if you don't get them out, sooner or later a few of them finally will figure out how it works and they’ll become real cancer cells and will go on the prowl. That's when we need to worry.”

I was lucky and the tissues were clean; there was no cancer in the lymph nodes and the doctor concluded that, in fact, the biopsy had probably gotten out all my little gang members. No need to worry about where I was to be buried, at least not for the immediate future.

Nonetheless, I figured my subconscious was telling me something and, since our cat had died several years before, and our dog had succumbed to leukemia shortly before that, I realized we were petless. So, one fine summer's evening, as my daughter and I took our swim together—one older brother now off at college, the other working in Europe, and her father on a business trip —I responded positively when Chloe raised the subject of our getting a cat.

“Nicole has two cats, you know,” she said honestly. “I don't have any.”

We discussed as we swam, slow, comforting, companionable side strokes, none of this thrashing and slashing through the water in a fast crawl or free style, as it's now termed. Swimming was relaxing and companionable for me and for Chloe. I told Chloe we would need to speak with Dad, who I suspected would prefer a dog, and reminded her that there was a lot to think about in terms of responsibility with an animal.

One of my mother's favorite stories was based on that old children's verse, “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.” Mother's version begins with a little boy who loves the stars and wants more than anything else in the world to become an astronomer. Each night the young boy ventures out into the dark to gaze longingly at the heavens, saying, with awe and reverence, “Twinkle, twinkle, little star. How I wonder what you are.”

As the boy grows older, he studies the stars in school, goes off to college and majors in astronomy. He studies for a PhD at one of the top universities and writes a pathbreaking dissertation about the stars, one that puts him at the forefront of the profession and brings him great acclaim. The boy—now a young man—feels good about himself. He has done what he started out to do. So now each evening he strides proudly into the night and looks up confidently at the stars, pronouncing with great satisfaction and a sense of fulfillment, “Twinkle, twinkle, little star. Now I know just what you are.”

The young man accepts a position in a top astronomy department and continues to teach and write about the stars, advancing the field with great brilliance. He becomes an accomplished teacher, nurturing many young scholars, and achieves great fame and many honors in the process of writing his awardwinning books and articles. He increasingly wears his celebrity lightly, however, driven always by his love for the stars and his desire to understand them better.

Just as the little boy grew into a young man, so the young man matures and ages. As the now distinguished but elderly gentleman nears the end of his life, he continues his nightly pilgrimages into the starry night, gazing up at the heavens and declaring, with great reverence and quiet respect, “Twinkle, twinkle, little star. How I wonder what you are!”

Mother meant this, of course, as a folksy homily on the fact that we all think we know things only to learn later that perhaps we didn't know quite as much as we thought. Humility, Mother was telling me, comes with age.

I like to think of myself as a forgiving person. Only twice in my life have I ever drawn a line through someone's name in my emotional address book, and doing so did not make me feel good about myself. After all, it's better to forgive, isn't it? Holding onto an angry grudge will only trap you back there in the pain; isn't that what everyone says?

Thinking about two incidents when I did not forgive someone, however, made me revisit the whole concept of forgiveness, and now I’m not so sure it is always the right thing to do. Mostly I find forgiveness more complicated than I had thought before. We too easily confuse the essence of forgiveness—absolving the offending party for having done harm—with the act of relinquishing our own anger and resentment against the one who hurt us and then finding a way to craft an ongoing relationship with them.

The first story involves my friend Josie (not her real name). I’d been very close to Josie in college. I had been the one who introduced her to her husband while I was in grad school. And even though we lost track for much of the postgrad school years, we did keep in touch. So, when I moved to New York City, I reconnected with Josie, along with other mutual friends from Smith.

This was not the best time in my life. My only brother, Jamie, had been diagnosed with leukemia shortly before I began teaching at New York University (NYU). My second year there, Jamie's illness worsened and he died in December 1978. My father had died three years before Jamie got sick. Grandpa Bob died in July 1978, and my then boyfriend dumped me in January 1979, a month after Jamie's death.

The Christmas after Jamie died was bleak. I had no emotional energy to deal with anything except my mother's pain and grief from a wound so deep it went beyond anything words can capture. Losing a child must be the cruelest blow of all in life. When I returned to New York City after Christmas break, however, I called Josie to tell her about Jamie.