Power Lines

Photo from The Daily Princetonian, April 5, 1978

In the spring of my junior year at Princeton, a newly formed student group called the People’s Front for the Liberation of South Africa staged a demonstration outside a meeting of the university’s board of trustees. Their demand was that the university help bring an end to the apartheid regime in South Africa by disinvesting in corporations doing business in that country. The trustees refused, and by the following spring, noisy lunchtime demonstrations in front of the school’s administration building had become a daily event.

The trustees’ position was that divestiture would have a severe impact on the university’s finances while doing little to advance the anti-apartheid cause. They maintained that they could do more good by using their influence as stockholders to pressure the corporations to sever their South African ties.

The demonstrators rejected that argument as mere self-interested rationalization. That may have been so, but I wondered how the demonstrators could be so confident of their own rightness. We were, after all, students — people who presumably were attending this university for the opportunity to learn from people who were wiser and more experienced than we were. If we believed that we knew better, what reason did we have to pay tuition? As someone who knew nothing about corporate investment, I just didn’t feel qualified to take sides in this dispute.

Beyond that, as a philosophy major, I was convinced of the primacy of rational argument. Ideally, if two people have conflicting beliefs, the one who can make a valid argument for his or her belief must prevail, because the laws of logic are unassailable. Unfortunately, as I eventually came to recognize (and as I explored in “Modus Ponens”), rational argument rarely succeeds in real life, because every argument must begin with basic premises accepted by both sides. In a world where people have not only vastly different values but conflicting sets of facts, there’s no set of agreed-upon premises that a logical argument can be based on. In the South African example, both sides could claim — truthfully — to be anti-apartheid, but one side believed in the political effectiveness of free-market capitalism while the other did not. Under those circumstances, there was no way one side could convince the other.

So what do people do when they can’t settle a dispute by means of argument? They do what those Princeton students did: They exercise power. If one side can’t persuade the other of the rightness of their position, they do what they can to force their opponent to yield. In the case of the student activists, the repeated demonstrations — culminating in a sit-in in the administration building — brought the weight of public opinion down onto the university, pressuring the trustees to do what was necessary to protect the school’s reputation. In more extreme cases, the exercise of power may take the form of physical force, property damage, or potentially lethal violence.

My problem with the exercise of power is that it is essentially amoral. Either side can use it, and either side can prevail, regardless of the rightness of their position.

Power was viewed differently in pre-Enlightenment times. When a fight took place between two individuals or two armies, the outcome was presumed to reflect God’s plan. Whichever side was victorious was not just stronger or luckier; they were — by definition — demonstrably right, in that their position must also have been God’s position.

I don’t think anyone believes that anymore. We acknowledge that the outcome of a battle (whether literal or figurative) is arbitrary, and that the difference between victory and defeat is strictly a matter of whose strategy and tactics are more effective. Sometimes the good guys win, sometimes the bad guys win, and there’s not much we can do to change that.

As much as I distrust the use of power to settle conflicts, I recognize that often it’s the only option. In the case of racial justice, Black people — whether in the U.S., in South Africa, or elsewhere in the world — would not have been able to overcome oppression without active resistance in the form of marches, civil disobedience, and sometimes violent clashes with law enforcement. We can all agree with Martin Luther King’s famous quote that “A riot is the voice of the unheard.” And yet, the people who stormed the U.S. Capitol in the wake of Donald Trump’s electoral defeat also considered themselves to be the unheard.

A conflict can be considered to have ended only if one side is able to convince the other of the rightness of their belief. Otherwise, no dispute is ever settled; it just awaits the slow and unpredictable shifts in power from one side to the other.

Posted October 19, 2021 by Mark S
Category: Society
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Dance Academy (2)

(part two of two)

I recently saw a performance (well, four performances — more about that in a moment) by my favorite San Francisco dance company, FACT/SF. The piece, called “Split,” is performed by a single dancer for a single audience member, eight times a night. Four different dancers perform the show in rotation, each with a different, personal interpretation of the choreography. Naturally, then, I went to see it four times.

As you might expect from a piece that’s performed one-on-one, “Split” is largely about identity — or as FACT/SF’s director Charles Slender-White puts it, “the relationship between dissociative episodes and identity formation,” particularly among members of the queer community. In other words, it’s about the experience of finding out that you’re not who you thought you were.

Seeing the show started me on the path of thinking deeply about the nature of identity. “Identity” is a word we use all the time, but it’s not always clear what we mean by it. When I was an undergraduate philosophy major, one of the fields I studied was that of “personal identity,” which addresses questions like “If all the cells in the human body are replaced over a period of seven to ten years, in what sense can I be considered the same individual that I was ten years ago?” But that’s a technical application of the term, and not the way it tends to be used in ordinary conversation.

The news these days is filled with talk about “identity politics,” which is the idea that your membership in a group — particularly a group that has experienced oppression or discrimination — dictates your political agenda. More controversially, it holds that people who are not members of that group cannot understand your life experience, and therefore have no right to speak for you. In this context, identity can be considered simply a collection of categories into which one fits. In any political discussion, I would be considered an old, straight, white, cisgender, Jewish American man.

But does that description really constitute my identity? After all, I didn’t invent those categories. I may have some beliefs about which I fit into, but other people — or society at large — may have different beliefs. If neo-Nazis start rounding up Jews, it won’t help for me to tell them that I’ve never practiced Judaism. In practice, they get to decide my identity; I don’t.

I think that if “identity” is to have any real meaning, it would have to be something that’s inherent in me, not something that’s determined by others. And yet, when people talk about their own experience of establishing an identity, they tend to use those same externally defined categories. We’ve all heard people say “I thought I was straight, but I realized that I’m gay.” “I was assigned male at birth, but I’ve always been a woman.” “My light skin makes people think I’m white, but I’m really Black.” Of course these distinctions have real social and political consequences, but fitting into a particular group or category can hardly constitute who one really is.

So I came to ask, what’s my identity? Descriptors like “American” or “male” may apply to me in a political context, but they don’t resonate with me personally. “Straight” may describe who I’m attracted to, but it doesn’t say anything about who I am. “Old” may characterize my body, but not the being that inhabits it.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that real identity is undefinable and indescribable. I am who I am, and nothing more can be said about it.

It occurred to me that this may be why I’ve always had problems with my name. I’ve never much identified with the name Mark Schaeffer (or, for that matter, either Mark or Schaeffer). When I hear myself referred to that way, my immediate mental reaction is, “Who’s that?” So I’ve always sensed that I have the wrong name, but it all these years, I’ve never been able to figure out what the right one is.

I’ve asked friends — some of whom have changed their own names — what they think my “real” name would be. People have offered suggestions, but all of their proposed names felt equally arbitrary. It’s only recently that I’ve come to realize that all names are arbitrary. They’re just labels that we each put on a collection of cells that’s being replaced every seven to ten years. How do I know that I’m the same individual that I was ten years ago? At least I can say, “Well, I have the same name.”

But my true identity — whatever that is — doesn’t have a name, and it doesn’t have categories. Neither does yours. As I stated in my previous post, the dance is the dance. Now I have to add: The dancer is the dancer.

Posted October 12, 2021 by Mark S
Category: Philosophy
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Dance Academy (1)

(part one of two)

Dance, as a performing art, has always been mysterious to me. Of course the rhythmic motion of bodies in space has intrinsic beauty — no mystery there! — but a significant and persistent part of me wants to understand that motion. Why is the dancer’s body moving this way rather than that way? What logic underlies the ordering of individual movements into one sequence rather than another? Can continuous changes in the position of four limbs and a torso be said to have a meaning, and if so, where does that meaning come from?

It wasn’t until relatively late in life that I figured out that I was asking the wrong questions. Dance, I came to realize, is very similar to music — in fact, it might even be considered a physical analogue to music.

When I studied music theory in college, I was taught the rules of counterpoint, which essentially dictate which notes can follow — or coincide with — other notes. The counterpoint exercises that I had to do were frustratingly difficult, because each new note that I placed on the staff severely restricted what notes I could place there afterward. Working through each exercise felt like trying to solve a particularly sadistic puzzle.

The graduate student who graded my assignments was not impressed with my work. “Didn’t you once mention that you write music?” he asked, with a degree of irritation.

“I have lots of songwriting experience,” I said. “Why?”

“Well, the counterpoint exercises you’re turning in aren’t very musical.”

I could have taken that as an insult, but instead I experienced it as a revelation. I had entirely misunderstood what these exercises were for. I’d been treating them like math problems or logic puzzles, when in fact they were about writing music!

That realization allowed me to recognize that I actually knew the rules of counterpoint. I might not know them intellectually, but I had certainly internalized them through years of listening to and making music. The next time I had to do a counterpoint exercise, I didn’t stop to think about it. I simply sang out a musical phrase, and wrote down what I’d sung. Then I sang the harmony line that I imagined would go with it. I had to do a bit of massaging to make sure all of the requirements were met, but most of my work was already done.

The same wisdom comes into play when I listen to music. I’m not analyzing the melodies and harmonies note by note or looking for a meaning. Having some familiarity with music theory helps me make sense of what I’m hearing, but my primary activity in listening to music isn’t analytical. I’m just experiencing the music, as music, without the need to translate it into anything else.

So now I’m learning to relate to dance in the same way I relate to music — to simply experience dance as dance. I don’t have the same foundation in dance theory that I have in music theory, but I do have a lifetime of experience with having a body — a body that moves! — and observing the motions (both choreographed and unchoreographed) of other bodies. Surely I must have internalized some rules during that time, despite not being in touch with them intellectually. And surely those internalized rules give me some context in which to organize the sensory data I take in while watching a dancer in motion.

Therefore, I don’t have to think about why this movement follows that one, just as I don’t have to think about why one note follows another. Those are matters of concern only to the choreographer or the composer. When my brain insists on finding some articulable way to interpret what I’m seeing, I’m increasingly able to tell it to get out of the way. The meaning of the dance is the dance.

Coda: In writing this post, I’ve started to notice how many other elements of my life fall into a similar category. Consider another of my great pleasures: good whiskey. I’m always amused at the serious attention that whiskey drinkers (and wine drinkers, for that matter) pay to tasting notes: “Lemon and orange peel with hints of chocolate…” “A suggestion of lime and a slight woodiness…” “Baked apples, red berries, and sweet honey…” These notes can serve a practical purpose in helping to convince a friend to try a whiskey you like (or in trying to convince a customer to buy one), but they’re merely descriptions of the whiskey — they say nothing about what the whiskey is, or what the distiller’s intention was in making it. The essence of the whiskey lies entirely in drinking the whiskey, at which point none of the words matter.

Posted October 5, 2021 by Mark S
Category: Arts
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Practice to Deceive

Like many boys of my generation, I became interested in magic during my preteen years. Partly it was because performing magic tricks was a way to get attention and recognition, which was pretty much my full-time job. Beyond that, though, I think wanting to learn magic was a response to the powerlessness that came with being a child. Knowing secrets that adults didn’t know, being able to baffle and mystify them, would in a small way give me power over them.

The library had plenty of how-to magic books for kids, and from those books I learned to build a few practical illusions, such as an apparently empty box that would become full of knickknacks, or a sheet of newspaper that could be torn up and become whole again. But I found that no adults were particularly mystified by them: It was clear to everyone that the trick was purely mechanical, even if the exact details of the mechanism weren’t obvious. (In one case, I demonstrated to my uncle a crank-and-roller device that would convert a one-dollar bill to a five-dollar bill; he grabbed the resulting five-dollar bill and tore it up. “What’s the matter?” he said mockingly when I broke into tears. “Can’t you make more of them?”)

Eventually, I discovered — as with so many other things — that I’d gotten magic all wrong. Knowing the secrets of how tricks were done was only a small part of it. The real power of magic lay in being able to do things: feints, sleight of hand, misdirection. These were physical skills that needed to be mastered through intensive practice. That realization marked the end of my ambition to become a magician. The idea that anyone could acquire skills like those was a form of magic that was beyond my comprehension.

When it comes to physical skills, the adage that “practice makes perfect” has rarely applied to me. In my freshman year of college, I chose tennis for my required phys-ed course. The first step in learning tennis was being able to repeatedly hit a ball against a wall. I spent the entire semester fruitlessly trying to hit the ball as it bounced back at me, never reaching the level where I could play against another person. In my 20s, inspired by my college roommate Jay, I decided to take up juggling. Despite dedicated daily practice, I never got past the first step of being able to toss a single beanbag from hand to hand. Later, I rehearsed a relatively simple piano accompaniment for weeks on end in preparation for a performance, but never got to the point where I could play it without mistakes.

Even when skills are not explicitly body-based, I’m not sure that the length of time spent exercising them has much of an impact. We tend to think of knowledge and skills as going hand-in-hand, but I, for one, experience them quite differently. I certainly know more than I did when I was in high school, but I wouldn’t say that my skill level — my ability to apply what I know — has changed much over the past fifty years. The things that I’m good at, such as problem-solving, writing, and doing creative work, I’ve been good at right from the start. The things that I’m not so good at, such as big-picture thinking (see “The Freeway Problem”) and social interaction, I haven’t gotten much better at despite a lifetime of trying to do so.

My experience of skills being relatively static has led to one of my big deficiencies as a teacher. I’m very good at explaining things — the knowledge part — but not good at enabling students to get better at what they’re doing. If, despite repeatedly getting detailed corrective feedback on their work, a student remains unable to tell a well-composed photograph from an ill-composed one, or a well-timed video edit from a random one, my internal reaction is, “Well, it appears that you don’t have the knack for this. Maybe you should try something else.” Of course, I would never say that directly to the student. Doing so would go directly against what we’re supposed to do, which is to encourage the student to persist no matter what.

On the other hand, despite my instincts to the contrary, I must admit that there is something to be said for persistence. I have known actors and designers whose skills — in my judgment, at least — are mediocre, yet who have continued to believe in their own excellence. Somehow, their self-regard rubs off on others, and their careers continue to advance. (I can also think of a recent president who falls into this category.) Their skills don’t improve, but it turns out not to matter.

Posted September 29, 2021 by Mark S
Category: Education
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Parent-Teacher Association

It was a Monday morning in spring, the day after Daylight Saving Time had taken effect, and my first-grade teacher asked whether anyone had stories about how the resetting of the clocks had affected them. Nobody raised their hand, so I raised mine. “I lost an hour of sleep!” I said.

“Mark, everybody lost an hour of sleep,” said the teacher, patronizingly. “Does anybody have any real stories?”

This sounds like a very minor exchange, but I still feel its sting nearly six decades later. The teacher had wanted to start a discussion, and I thought I was helping. My loss of sleep was the only story I had, and it had the added benefit of showing that I understood the basic premise of Daylight Saving Time. But I was shot down, summarily dismissed. It’s the first time I remember feeling that school was not a place where I’d find help and encouragement, but a place where I’d be judged.

Of course, I’d clearly been judged all along, but only positively. I was diligent and eager to please — partly because I enjoyed learning, but also out of self-preservation. At the beginning of the school year, my teacher had called my mother to advise her that I was holding my pencil incorrectly, and my mother had reacted furiously. “How does it make me look if you don’t know how to hold a pencil?” she yelled. So it was clear to me that I’d be in real trouble if any further negative reports came from my school.

Teachers have always judged students; it’s unfortunately part of their job. Grading students’ work has always been my least favorite part of teaching college courses, because it puts me in a position of authority that feels unjust. My stance as a teacher has never been “I am here to educate you,” but rather, “I have a lifetime of experience with this subject matter, and I’m eager to share it with you, but only to the extent that you think it will help you. I don’t know everything, and I may be wrong sometimes.” I always give students extensive written feedback on their assignments, but I try to make clear that this feedback is only my opinion, and they can take it for what it’s worth.

The odd thing is that students never seem to get that message. I remember, early in my teaching career, coming back to my class after a ten-minute break and saying, “I want to apologize. In teaching the lesson before the break, I was talking to you as if I’m somebody special and superior. I’m really not.”

The students just stared at me. “But you’re the teacher,” one of them said, and the rest nodded. They actually seemed embarrassed.

I’m sure this is because, like me, they came out of a system in which the teacher is presumed to be someone important and authoritative, someone whose opinions and judgments have real significance. And teachers have to play that role, because otherwise the grades that they give — grades that have the potential to shape a student’s future — would have no legitimacy.

The problem is that, as every student knows, teachers’ judgments are often wrong. I felt the system’s unfairness frequently as a student — partly because I was unusually sensitive, but partly because whatever conclusions a teacher reached about me were echoed and amplified by my parents.

When my second-grade teacher assigned us to draw a self-portrait, I took it as a challenge. I had never thought of myself as looking any particular way — I was just a generic boy, with eyes and a nose and a mouth no different from anyone else’s. But if this drawing was specifically supposed to represent me, I had to find out what was unique about my appearance. I spent a long time staring into the mirror, pencil-sketching every line on my face and every imperfection I could find. The result, given my second-grade-level drawing skills, must have looked like a wrinkled old man. But it represented my best attempt to do what had been asked of me.

To my shame, the teacher sent the drawing home with me to show my parents, with a big X at the top and “I want Mark” written in red pen. My mother was incensed that I had failed such a simple assignment, and sent me to my room to do it again. What I came out with was what had apparently been expected of me all along: a colorful crayon drawing with a generic round head, scribbled brown hair, dots for eyes, and a curved, smiling mouth. That drawing got an A from my teacher, and a gold star.

If anybody asks me how I came to be so cynical about education, that’s the reason.

Posted September 22, 2021 by Mark S
Category: Education
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