March 24, 2010
When French poet Jean Cocteau told Coco Chanel “you think like a man,” mad, she countered by grabbing a silk ribbon and tying it around her head (bow forward). “Chanel may have believed she was equal to any man,” writes Janet Wallach, “but she never confused the two sexes. Parity was important, but femininity was an imperative.”
March 8, 2010
Beer turns lots of people into citizen philosophers, including me.
I was nursing a Guinness the other day with my friend, Ajeet, when, apropos of nothing, he sighed and announced, “Well, I’ve fulfilled my biological destiny. I’ve fathered a boy and a girl.” He didn’t elaborate, although I gave him the space to. All I remember is, the “dot, dot, dot” at the end of his statement sounded like it was turned all the way up to eleven.
Paleolithic Man was driven by the instinct to replicate himself (when he wasn’t outsmarting death). What choice did he have when saber-toothed tigers were crouching around every corner and the weather constantly threatened to wipe out his food options? Today’s comforts and conveniences, however, have relieved us of much of the physical struggle to survive, at least in the West. With snacks and beverages a given, we’ve turned our questing spirit over to identifying the purpose of life beyond survival (meaning: we stare into space and hoppy drinks a lot more and stay up all night having life-dissecting conversations).
To illustrate this — and this is totally unscientific — look at the number of breathless shout outs in the Twitter stream coming from travelers determined to share their sightings of the sun burning its way through the morning mist in India, or sinking behind the horizon in Africa. All, in my mind, confirm our need to reach for something indefinably greater. In my own romantic/existential hazes, I’ve felt an inexplicable urgency to draw and share the colours of the sky over Toronto created with a swirl of my finger across my iPhone screen. I’d say this makes me part of the growing contingent of smart phone owners who are using technology to bridge time and space and join forces with the universe.
Writer and poet, Edith Cobb, put it best when she said, “The need to extend the self in time and space — the need to create in order to live, to breathe, and to be — precedes, indeed, of necessity exceeds, the need for self-reproduction as a personal survival function.” And while this is not a quote fest, let me point out something else the singer/songwriter Judy Collins said to her friend, Gloria Steinem, when GS was weathering a case of the mean reds. Both knew that art was not some rarefied pursuit. “We have five senses because we’re supposed to use them,” explained Collins. “I think we each come out of the womb with some unique way of looking at the world, and if we don’t express it, we lose faith in ourselves.”
My main man Jeremy Rifkin, author of The Empathic Civilization, has something to say about this too. Rifkin sees a new role for the internet as a platform for collectively boosting our faith in ourselves and each other, and he reinforced this in January at a talk he delivered to the employees at Google, captured on YouTube.
Rifkin believes the net has this rare ability to “connect the central nervous system of the human race.” It’s like nothing we’ve ever seen before and it’s changing our consciousness, he says. He wants to see Google getting actively involved in extending our capacity for empathy and social change (especially in the raising of our biosphere consciousness).
I know what he means about connecting the central nervous system. Writing a letter doesn’t feel anything like the prickly rush I sometimes get after I lob my heartfelt ideas and sketches into cyberspace. And while speed is a part of it, it’s really about breadth. Letters are a contained experience (as they should be in certain cases). The net isn’t. There’s something about taking chances with more than one person that we’ve never experienced before, at least at this scale. As Rifkin explains it, the internet is feeding into our innate need to broaden and deepen our relationships and participate in “more expansive communities of meaning.”
The possibilities of the internet to spread empathy also raises new and more hopeful possibilities for re-imagining human nature. The Greed is Good characterization of human nature — born in the eighteenth century and alive today in our constant re-casting of Michael Douglas in his Gordon Gekko role from the movie, Wall Street — is still gospel, as Rifkin points out, but it’s no longer sacrosanct. The record amount of money raised for Haiti through Twitter made us rethink ourselves and our potential.
Indeed, Michael Douglas’s own personal relationships, especially the one with his son, have made him do a big re-think about his choices and his nature. His life shows how one father’s self-serving behaviour made the people closest to him lose faith in themselves. I get exactly the opposite feeling from Jeff Bridges’ relationship with his dad, Lloyd (wasn’t that a great Oscar tribute!). The Bridges family was (and is) all about expressing and extending the best we have to offer.
I feel that way too about my friend Ajeet and his kids. So much for “dot, dot, dot.”
*Ajeet is not my friend’s real name.
March 4, 2010
Anne Mroczkowski has thought about it, but gender is one rabbit hole she doesn’t want to go down, at least not in public.
Last month, the award-winning journalist and co-host of Toronto’s CityNews at Six on City TV was fired. She was one of about 35 staffers handed their walking papers and one of seven on air reporters (six women and one a man) to go “poof” in these tough economic times. Mroczkowski’s longtime co-host, Gord Martineau, is now manning the ship on his own.
Two weeks ago when the CBC’s Anna Maria Tremonti sat down with Mroczkowski to talk about her 23-year career at City and ask what’s next, each tensed up over the issues of age and gender. Both women are highly accomplished, whip-smart and gracious, so the idea that one of them may be banging up against the invisibility curse so often bestowed upon women at a certain stage in their life and careers is downright deflating. For all of us. All those years of hard work and for what? The only thing Mroczkowski had to say was that she didn’t think she’d be working in front of the camera again.
Film directors Nora Ephron (Julie & Julia) and Nancy Meyers (As Good As It Gets and It’s Complicated) have thought about this too and are determined to give the growing contingent of accomplished, but invisible, women a place to go (at least in film). Their entertaining pictures depict women in their fifties and sixties with great jobs and satisfying sex lives, and no one goes, “Eeww,” or looks away (at least not in the mixed theatre crowds I’ve been in).
I should mention, this is hard to discuss in a public forum. I’m not some tough-minded broad who couldn’t give a shit about what others think of her. A side of me would still like people to think birds hang my laundry. But I’ll be that age some day and I hope I’m going to a good place. That’s why I’m asking questions now.
Of course, the challenge for women who ask a lot of questions (every woman I know) is that our searching dispositions and bald observations about life’s double standards can often be labelled as griping. So we make choices: the easy one is to keep quiet so everyone can hear the sound of the birds chirping; the hard one is to say what you think and weather the reaction.
That second option takes courage. Sometimes when I say what’s on my mind, the saried matchmakers in the Bollywood blockbusters I’ve seen invade my dreams at night (they will tonight, after this post). They dance and trill and issue warnings like, “Don’t say anything too intelligent,” in between all their wavy hand movements.
I can’t help but wonder what sort of fall-out this kind of behaviour will have on me personally in the long run? I should add, when I’m in full-on questioning mode it’s hard not to think of those movies where the feisty female lead has to die in the end because it’s too hard for the director and producers (mostly suits) to imagine what sort of life a woman could lead after she’s asserted herself. (Help me here, people, I’m trying to come up with an example I can link to. I know they exist; I’ve read enough Johanna Schneller film reviews [love her!] to know about this yet-to-be-named sub-category of chick flicks).
That’s why we need more directors and producers (women and men) telling cradle-to-grave stories of women’s lives on the big and small screens. No more of this stopping a quarter of the way through with a fairy tale wedding or a weepy cancer diagnosis. If this were to happen — if women could see all of the decades of their lives chronicled in technicolour — I predict the sale of wrinkle creams would go down because women wouldn’t have to rely as heavily on the promise of cosmetics to avoid being ignored. Aging wouldn’t be the stressor we’re currently shown and told that it is if ordinary women’s entire lives were honoured more publicly. After all, most of us keep living past 25, and then go on to outlive the men in our lives. Dove addressed this imbalance in their Campaign For Real Beauty, but, still, it left only a small ding on our culture.
Let me wind down this post by saying, I think we’re at a point in history when the great psycho-cultural question isn’t Freud’s, What do women want? We’re past that. The question du jour is, rather, What do we want from women? And women of all ages.
In a few short decades (and after centuries of deliberately under-performing), women in the West have shown en masse what they’re capable of in operating theatres, court rooms, newsrooms and beyond. But, apart from a few exceptions — like Meyers and Ephron, More Magazine and Zoomer Magazine — pop culture persists in turning away from us the further along we are in life’s journey.
I’m hoping that the members of the generations who graduated with Anne Mroczkowski and Paula Todd, as well as Hillary Clinton and Margaret Wente, will reject this pattern of disappearance, especially in professions that show women aging before our eyes. Do we really want to stop looking at and listening to Mroczowski in favour of a recent college grad? If the answer to that is Yes, then how do we change that to a No, not necessarily? What steps does society have to take to open people’s minds and eyes to a new way of looking at women?
The biggest thing I’ve learned since I started this blog last month is that our view of human nature is remarkably flexible (or fickle!). Through the centuries, it has evolved from downright disturbing (we’re all sinners, according to the church; yeah, seething sexual monsters, added Freud) to empathetic and hopeful (remember the “mirror neurons” I described in my post on March 1st?).
If we’re that flexible, I’m thinking we may just be capable of changing our stance on women and aging from one of rejection to full acceptance.
March 1, 2010
I’m adopted and so are my brothers. When I was born I beamed a lot and within weeks was matched with a family. But one of my older brothers spent the first seven months of his life bouncing around in foster care. Five different foster families returned him because he wouldn’t stop crying.
My mother was the first to hold him like she meant it, and that’s when he relaxed and discovered smiling. He was home. My dad told me that.
At the time, Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care was every parent’s Bible. Still, I sometimes wonder if Spock’s message was lost on the other families my brother didn’t click with. He encouraged parents to trust their instincts, show empathy and pick up their kids when they were upset. Mum read his book, but only because his research confirmed her take on life.
My dad, in case you’re wondering, didn’t read Spock (this was back when men still wore fedoras and trench coats and women donned aprons without an ironic grin, meaning: their two worlds never crossed). Had he read it, I don’t think he would have thrown a steaming diaper out the nursery window. “I didn’t know where I was supposed to put it,” he admitted years later. It landed with a thud on the front lawn and my mother retrieved it when she returned home from the supermarket.
But back to my brother’s crying marathon. This was 1964 and there were still a lot of mothers, especially those influenced by know-it-all grandmothers, who adhered to the old school wisdom on child rearing that said too much affection would turn babies into needy, clingy adults. Let’em cry until there are no more tears, they’d say before returning to their euchre hand or Ed Sullivan. I think that happened to my brother, until he found the right family.
This hands-off approach was established in the foundling hospitals that warehoused orphaned and abandoned infants at the turn of the last century. Here fighting germs was more important than nurturing, explains Jeremy Rifkin in The Empathic Civilization. Being a detached and clinical caregiver was a holdover from the 18th century view of human nature: the one that said from the moment we’re born we’re rational and autonomous beings and should be cared for in such a way to ensure we continue to be independent and self-sufficient. My brother balked at this approach to human nature.
Today when we pick up a baby, we’re elated when we can get them to smile at us. Did you see that? we cheer, like we’ve just spotted a shooting star. As a culture, we understand the power of eye contact and touching, so when we reach out to a child it’s as much for us as it is them. But this approach is recent, and it’s largely due to the influence of science.
After centuries of living our lives under the assumption that we’re all sinners, and if not sinners then detached automatons, and if not automatons then self-serving hoarders and pleasure seekers, scientists are now finding that an empathic disposition is embedded in our biology (as it is with several other species of the mammalian kingdom, including monkeys). Biologists talk of “mirror neurons” lighting up in the premotor cortex of the brains of humans and monkeys when we feel empathy for another. This would explain why when one baby cries others in the adjacent cribs chime in, or why when an Olympic skater weeps because she’s thinking of her dead mother, tears spill down our faces too. Our tendency to match behavior is “involuntary” and “automatic,” say the experts, a “primary adaptive function.” (keeners, you can follow up on this in Rifkin, p. 112; he has amazing end notes citing all the recent studies).
But this response wasn’t described as a biological phenomenon until the 1980s, and surely we’ve been crying and caring for oneanother since the dawn of time. Rifkin figures empathy got pushed aside by historians and philosophers with a more bleak view of human nature. For a long time history only focused its lens on the pathology of power, he says. “More often than not [it] was made by the disgruntled and discontented, the angry and rebellious — those interested in exercising authority and exploiting others.” Now, with the encouragement of science we’re shifting our approach and finding kindred spirits among our fellow creatures. “Suddenly, our sense of existential aloneness in the universe is not so extreme.”
Rifkin thinks the deterioration of the environment may be forcing us to change the way we relate to one another (a future blog post, for sure). What researchers are learning about the way we evolve changes our most basic thinking about what it means to be a human being, he says.
It makes you wonder, as Rifkin does, if we really need to be “sending out radio communications to the far reaches of the cosmos in the hopes of finding some form of intelligent and caring life when what we [we’re] desperately seeking already exists and lives among us here on Earth”?
February 23, 2010
You laugh, but there was a time when we used to stare at a bouncing newborn baby and the first thing that came to mind was: You’re a depraved sinner. Better luck to you in the next life.
For 1500 years this view of human nature dominated because The Church defined our consciousness. And who were we to argue? says author Jeremy Rifkin in his latest page-turning tome, The Empathic Civilization.
By the eighteenth century, the philosophers of the Enlightenment (the majority of them economists) proposed a new take on human nature for the Western world. Now when we looked at that baby, we thought: You’re a rational, detached and autonomous creature, a blank slate waiting to be filled. These same secular thinkers predicted that the first word to be inscribed on that slate would be “Land.” Why? Because eventually every baby would grow up and want some, along with a drawstring sac full of coins.
For much of the eighteenth century, then, capitalism defined our consciousness and was responsible for our view of human nature. And who were we to argue? continues Rifkin.
By the 19th century, post-Enlightenment thinkers, like Jeremy Bentham, were getting a little more touchy-feely. Picking up that same baby, Bentham cooed, You’re a materialist. Just watch, you’re going to do everything in your power to avoid pain and maximize your pleasure. So when that baby cried, how he must have fumed before pushing the wretched creature off on a woman.
When the Austrian neurologist, Sigmund Freud, took over crib-side and inspected that baby through his round spectacles, he stroked his beard and took the pleasure principle one step further. Among other things, he proclaimed that breast feeding was an act driven not by hunger but the infant’s insatiable erotic desire to suck on its mother’s breast. In the twentieth century, the libido defined our consciousness and gave rise to a therapeutic approach to human nature that would have made a Medieval serf and a Victorian noblewoman scratch their heads. Mass advertising was quick to pick up on our sexiest take on human nature yet.
Today when we look at that newborn baby, do you want to know what we think about him (after we stop marveling over how tiny his fingers are)?
That, dear reader, I’ll share with you in my next post.
As Rifkin says, the work of evolutionary biologists combined with the effect of technology is challenging every single one of our old assumptions about human nature. It’s changing the way we relate to each other and, ultimately, the way we live out our lives.
February 17, 2010
“What does your son do?” asked a friend of François Zola.
“Nothing. He writes.” replied Zola, an engineer (mostly of bridges and dams) and father of the journalist and best-selling novelist, Emile Zola.
This conversation took place in the late nineteenth century, long before there were phones or the internet, so it was still possible for someone who wasn’t a regular newspaper reader to remain clueless that the younger Zola had hit it big with his pen.
But what strikes me about this quote (apart from the lack of paternal pride), and the reason I’m sharing it with you, is that I think it brings to light a pretty common misconception that’s having a huge affect on my life and anyone who’s chosen to write for a living. It’s the misconception that writing isn’t real work (i.e. it’s impractical compared to, say, bridge building) and anyone can do it (unlike, say, bridge building or calculus — even drawing). But we all write sentences. And texting is boosting our daily writing output even more.
Introduce this nonchalant attitude about writing to a tool like the internet (where FREE is still the business model of choice) and you can wave “bye, bye” to journalism as a viable career path.
Case in point: When a former editor at a internationally-acclaimed magazine got in touch with me in December to ask if I’d write health features for a new online publication she’s editing, this was her elevator pitch to me: “I’m hoping there is some way we might be able to work together. … The site is quite high volume in terms of the number of articles we’re publishing per month, [but] the content isn’t as in-depth as perhaps some of the magazine pieces we’re used to, [but, still, there] are opportunities here. Each story [400-500] words should only take you an hour and we don’t require any quotes or interviews. They’re nice to have, of course, but not necessary.”
God help me if I’m assigned a subject I’m not well versed in, like heart disease, breast cancer or AIDS. What am I supposed to tell the reading public if research is discouraged in favour of a quick turnaround time? I can’t make this stuff up and I don’t want to rewrite aggregated content, which doesn’t offer anything new on the subject and can perpetuate previously published errors. My editor friend closed her email with, “We pay $25 per story [standard for the net, but I’d get $500 or more if it were for a print magazine] and I estimate that each one could be written in about an hour… so $25 per story can work out to $25/hour… not bad!”
No story done well (and accurately) takes an hour. An average story takes about three days of researching, interviewing and writing and I can’t live on $25 for three days of work, but someone in India or China can, so I suspect outsourcing will be her next move. A month later, I noticed this same editor posted on her own blog Harlan Ellison’s hilarious, now viral, YouTube rant about the indignity and ridiculousness of working for free. Clearly, the new rules of journalism are getting to her too.
But this post is not about Alison’s financial survival (I’m moonlighting, begging and borrowing to avoid stealing). I don’t expect you to care about my solvency. But you should care about journalism and the stuff you’re reading online. I hope, like me, you’re casting a critical eye on the evolution of our digital economy and culture, especially the direction group dynamics are taking us (remember: wikis aren’t fact checked). If the dissemination of accurate information is breaking down in favour of an endless, infinitely expanding RSS feed, then we need to be willing to correct ourselves when human nature starts taking us down the wrong path.
Just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should.
February 12, 2010
Facebook (est. 2004 in a stinky Harvard dorm) took almost five years to attract its first 150 million users, but only eight months to double that number, says The Economist in a Special Report on Social Networking.
As a social platform initially designed to share tipsy pics and Saturday night plans, it’s becoming clear, and pretty fast, that Facebook has created a shift in human nature so significant it will require the funding of new university departments and specialized chairs to track and analayze its influence (I predict, before long, Social Media Studies will swallow campus Centres for Information Technology, which now sound so Web 1.0 — you know, so Felicity with her Palm Pilot and clam shell MacBook Pro).
The buzz that circled the world started around February 2009. That’s when Facebook and Twitter moved outside the world of twentysomethings and began seriously pecking at global business and communications. (at least, that’s the first time I noticed national newspapers in Canada, like The Globe & Mail, talking about this new Twitter thing. The rise of Twitter quickly fed back into the growth of Facebook as people started cross-linking their networks).
But changes in technology are not what’s significant here, says Cathy N. Davidson, a humanities professor at Duke University in Durham, N.C. What’s significant and “shocking,” she says, is our changed behavior. “The interactive process has replaced linear progress as the highest form of human endeavour.” As she explains it, “[What] the Internet Age teaches us [is] that we must be able to change, adapt and colloborate in situations where the end result is unpredictable.”
We’re not used to unpredictable end results, as history will attest. For at least five centuries we have equated scientific and technological progress with social change that’s continuous, consistent and irreversible, even predictable. The rich and the royal (think: the Medicis, the queens of England, France and Spain and countless popes in centuries past) fed and lodged artists and inventors, then hoarded their inventions (compasses, canons and square-rigged sails) and used them to expand and maintain their empires. (here I tip my hat to the research of Theodore Caplow)
But the internet is toppling the monopolies of our modern day Medicis, not to mention changing the fortunes of the inventors by distributing their wares to more users. More importantly, our definition of power is being re-written right before our eyes. The sand castle-like collapse of print media in the last year, and the impotence of its longtime rulers (think: Rupert Murdoch) is a good example of how the Internet Age is forcing the elite to share their power with the people. We all own (and tell) the news now, and like the troops who raided Versailles 
and strong-armed Marie Antoinette into the back of a carriage, who doesn’t love a freshly toppled monopoly and access to the halls of power? (Look, for example, at this nine year old blogger in the front row of Paris fashion week back in January. Similarly, last year Anna Wintour, Vogue’s Queen Bee, had to sit beside a 13-year old blogger. O. M. G.).
There’s been nothing like this overthrow in the history of mankind. Now anyone with a PC has a front row seat as it unfolds. I mean, think about it: the majority of those who lived through the most active phase of the Industrial Revolution were never aware of it.
Not us. We’re talking and linking about it like crazy.
February 10, 2010
Just when I thought smart phones were fast becoming the device of choice for philanderers, and sexting the most dominant literary form on these gadgets (“U look good naked,” etc., etc.), a new study shows that we’re using the email accounts on our phones and computers to spread more enlightening news.
An article by John Tierney in yesterday’s New York Times indicates that there’s hope for human nature, after all — not to mention long-form journalism which has been battered by quick ‘n quippy platforms, like Twitter and text messaging.
Tierney reports that from August 2008 to February 2009, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania followed the most popular articles e-mailed from the Grey Lady’s website and tracked the results every fifteen minutes; they even used computer algorithms to analyze the ratio of emotional words in the articles that generated the most traffic. It turns out, not only are we hooked on sharing stories with positive themes but we gravitate the most to long articles covering intellectually-challenging themes.
High on the list of stories that have gone viral: science articles on cosmology (that’s the branch of astronomy dealing with the evolution of the universe). Quirky also does well, like the story of the flock of free-range chickens found roaming the streets of Manhattan. But, to their delight, researchers kept finding that the most e-mailed articles had “a quality that went beyond surprise.” “An article about square watermelons is surprising,” Jonah Berger, the study’s lead researcher, told The Times. “But it doesn’t inspire that awed feeling that the world is a broad place and I’m so small,” he said. Berger and his team defined this quality as a feeling of “self-transcendence, a feeling of admiration and elevation in the face of something greater than the self.” It involves the opening and broadening of the mind.
Asked why we appear to be “spreading the awe” (my quotes) more enthusiastically than, say, passing on recipes or practical health or financial tips, which are also popular topics, Berger has a theory. “Emotion, in general, leads to transmission, and awe is quite a strong emotion,” he told The Times. “If I just read this story that changes the way I understand the world and myself, I want to talk to others about what it means. If [someone else] reads the article and feels the same emotion, [in the end] it will bring us closer together.”
So push “Send” and spread the awe, then bask in the closeness. I know I will.
