Tuesday, November 13, 2018

Because I am involved in mankind...

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee. Neither can we call this a begging of misery, or a borrowing of misery, as though we were not miserable enough of ourselves, but must fetch in more from the next house, in taking upon us the misery of our neighbours. Truly it were an excusable covetousness if we did, for affliction is a treasure, and scarce any man hath enough of it.
--John Donne,  Meditation XVII from Devotions upon Emergent Occasions

This semester I'm teaching a seminar on John Donne. My students and I are reading a significant selection of his poetry and prose (from the inadequate Modern Library edition), so we have spent the fall with the lusty young Donne of the "Songs and Sonets," the self-righteous Donne of the "Satyrs," and the grieving Donne of the "Epicedes and Obsequies." Today we encountered the sick Donne of the Devotions.

As I was re-reading to prepare for class, the famous passage from Meditation XVII took on new resonance, especially in light of the commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the Armistice ending World War I and the massing of troops at the US border immediately before the election to "harden the border" before the arrival of refugees from South America. 

I realized that this Donne is not just the sick Donne, or the pious Donne; it is the ethical and empathetic Donne, who sees himself "involved in mankind," who recognizes himself in his fellow human beings. 

And that led me to contemplate, as I do every morning, what seems to have gone wrong in our society--we have failed to be "involved in mankind," to recognize ourselves in others. We see it in our language describing the dead soldiers of World War I or the refugees on their desparate migration northward. Today, the Los Angeles Times reports that Customs and Border Patrol plans “to install and pre-position port hardening infrastructure equipment in preparation for the migrant caravan,” at the San Ysidro port of entry near San Diego. 

A collocates search on the NOW Corpus suggests just how "dehumanized" the word "caravan" is. Among the top 500 collocates, we see words suggesting national identity (Honduran, Guatemalan, Mexican) and words suggesting political status (asylum-seekers, migrant), but not one word that focuses on the shared humanity of the migrants (men, women, children). While we can't rely on collocation patterns to reveal exactly what people believe, we can rely on them to suggest speech patterns across large text sets. 

When we talk about the people migrating toward the US border with Mexico, we don't talk about them as people. I think that John Donne, across the centuries, encourages us to become "involved in mankind" and take "upon us the misery of our neighbours." 

Tuesday, October 30, 2018

On Globalism


globalism, n.
Pronunciation:  Brit.        /ˈɡləʊbəlɪz(ə)m/, /ˈɡləʊbl̩ɪz(ə)m/,  U.S. /ˈɡloʊbəˌlɪz(ə)m/
Origin: Formed within English, by derivation; modelled on a French lexical item. Etymons: global adj., -ism suffix.

Etymology: < global adj. + -ism suffix, perhaps after French globalisme (1923) Compare slightly later globalist n.

  The belief, theory, or practice of adopting or pursuing a political course, economic system, etc., based on global rather than national principles; an outlook that reflects an awareness of global scale, issues, or implications; spec. the fact or process of large businesses, organizations, etc., operating and having an influence on a worldwide scale, globalization.


Other, wiser minds, like Matthew Yglesias and Rabbi Rachel Barenblat have written about the anti-Semitic connotations of the term "globalist," so I won't rehearse them here. 

My goal in this short blog post is to suggest something different: we all need to be globalists. At a moment when our planet faces unprecedented environmental devastation that we have brought on largely through extractive capitalism and its reliance on fossil fuels for the last three hundred years, we need to have a global vision. Isolationism, nationalism, and fascism won't protect us from the consequences of environmental catastrophe. Moreover, we have a responsibility to our fellow humans to alleviate the suffering that we have all contributed to. We need "an outlook that reflects an awareness of global scale." We need to recognize that many of the refugees migrating to safety around the world are refugees from climate disasters. And refusing to define them as such will not change their circumstances. 

Perhaps the best way to reject White Supremacist dog-whistles like "Globalist" is to say, "Of course we're Globalists. We live or die on the Globe. And we should choose to live--together."

Friday, October 26, 2018

Teaching with differing abilities

It's been two years since I have used this space to record my thoughts or to set myself any kind of schedule for writing. Like many people, a great deal of cognitive space has been devoted to our political landscape. You may have seen the piece about post-election PTSD among students. While I know that I've felt a great deal of despair and expended a great deal of energy as I've watched our civil institutions decay, I resist using PTSD--a medical diagnosis we should reserve to characterize disability brought on by trauma--to describe how I'm feeling.

But as a college instructor, I'm aware of the ways that I need to structure my classes and my instruction to accommodate my students differing abilities. While fifteen years ago, I had more students with hearing or vision impairments that affected my delivery of instruction, today I'm encountering students who have attentional and executive function differences, sometimes brought on by persistent--and often under-treated--mental illness, particularly anxiety. Of course, the inverse question also troubles me: where have the students with hearing and vision loss gone? Why are we not seeing them in the English major?

As someone who has battled most of my life with generalized anxiety disorder and resulting depression, I contemplate how to make my struggles of use to my students. In private conversations, I've shared the short version with students who struggle, mainly so that I can convince them to seek care and to help remove the stigma against mental illness. I don't know, however, how to bring insights from my own struggle into explicit  consideration in the classroom. In the coming days, I'm going to be thinking about this, largely because I am considering John Donne's struggle with depression in his poetry and prose.