A family friend recently asked me a question: “What do you think Indians are smart at?”
I was puzzled, in part because there were many assumptions going into that question that I didn’t share, but also because this is not a kind of question that I usually think about. I shrugged.
Here’s another example. Just a few weeks ago, when I was visiting a friend on the East Coast (more on this later), one of his roommates made it clear that he didn’t think women should be allowed to drive. The roommate’s argument, as I understood it, was that women are too incompetent to be safe drivers. It was a jarring assertion to hear.
I felt extremely alienated from the person I was talking to in both moments. In a sense, these are moments when I was engaging with the most diverse people I’ll meet. Diversity is of axiomatic value to me, which implies that I should seek encounters with people who think fundamentally different ideas than I do. But those conversations didn’t feel particularly valuable. So I want to devote this post to thinking through what it means to live a diverse life and to celebrate diversity.
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When valuing diversity, two questions come to my head. First is a question of moral repugnance: what if the diverse perspective is morally abhorrent? Is it valuable, for example, to be exposed to perspectives that do not hold that all people are fundamentally equal and dignified?
I once asked a beloved high school teacher about an issue that was troubling me. I was listening to a lot of Avril Lavigne at the time (it was a phase), and there was a lyric that jumped out at me because it celebrates a night where she blacked out and hints that her romantic interest drugged her. It didn’t sit well with me to celebrate such an experience, and so I asked my teacher whether she thought I should stop listening to it. She explained that she thought everything you consume inevitably shapes you, and so she would be uncomfortable listening to the song. Listening to the song, she intimated, would subtly change how I think and feel even if I consciously resisted the implications.
Her advice has stuck with me when thinking about diversity because it suggests that whom we associate with shapes who we become. In that sense, there is much force to the concern about moral repugnance. It’s just a spin on the conventional wisdom about parenting: ensure that your kids don’t end up in “the wrong crowd.” People don’t usually change their beliefs due to arguments or rational thinking; it’s by spending time with people — by normalizing and modeling their behavior — that people change. Does engaging with difference that is morally repugnant degrade your own sensibilities? And, more basically, is it a bad time? Is it frustrating and grating and tiring to engage with those who are so alien?
I’ve tried to manage these concerns by being curious when meeting someone different. In other words, rather than judging someone for having a “bad take,” I try to be puzzled — to understand how, or why, they came to think the way they do. I’ve realized, though, that this approach raises at least two subsidiary concerns. First, it may reduce people to objects — it may treat them as phenomena “out there” to be studied rather than real, living, thinking humans to be celebrated. Second, it may turn people off. A friend recently told me that I sometimes ask questions too pointedly and that I come off as aggressive when I do so. In hindsight, I can understand where the perception comes from (there are times when I’m bothered by someone and I do ask very pointed questions!). And so while I can work on both of these concerns, they do suggest that being puzzled won’t always work at allowing me to connect across diversity.
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Let me assume away those problems, though, and reflect on a second question that challenges my relationship to a diverse other: the issue of mirroring. In social science research, we always need to think about how data are produced. In lots of hard science, we can assume independence between the phenomena we are observing and the observation itself. But in social science, that is almost never true. Read a survey and you’ll notice how much question wording matters. Interview someone and you’ll find that your questions, tone, emotions — even your dress — shape their responses. The postmodern social scientists rightly, I think, call upon us to reflect on our role in creating data — to be reflexive about our positionality, to use the academic jargon.
One way to think about this point is that the encounter with a “diverse other” is definitionally about oneself. You need to know who you are to know who is different from you. There is no difference except in opposition to sameness. When encountering someone who is different, then, you can opt for two different strategies. You can seek to reduce difference: to “code switch” and talk like them; to make small talk over common experiences (“if the weather continues, we are in for a lovely summer”); to seek common ground. But you can also do the opposite — to seek to lean into differences. But doing so also, I think, requires you to box them in — to ask the other, in effect, to perform their difference as you understand it.
I’ve noticed this tendency with my own behavior. Over the last four months especially, I’ve been meeting a lot of deeply religious people, whether through the Anglican church I’ve been attending, an interfaith seminar I took at LSE, or various Muslim events a friend has been taking me to. I find that in meeting people, I’m increasingly boxing them into certain facets of their faith. I push them on points of theology. I read scripture with them. I ask about their understanding of ethics. I do with the religious, in other words, what I do with the nonreligious. Perhaps it’s about the Bible rather than the London Review of Books, but the conversations are hardly different in form. And when I encounter people who have different relationships with their faith — people who aren’t so theologically or doctrinally inclined — the conversations are often more stunted and difficult. I met a Marshall who was raised with a Jewish background, and she basically felt no affinity for studying the Hebrew Bible. We talked about religion some, but it actually ended up being a somewhat awkward conversation in part due to my expectation that we could discuss scripture.
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The problems of moral repugnance and mirroring are ultimately, I think, tests of the authenticity of my commitment to diversity. In some part of me, I feel a sense that I can’t really value diversity if I don’t spend time with people who hold views I find morally repugnant. In some part of me, I feel that I’ve failed to live a diverse life if the people around me behave like mirrors rather than performing some “authentic” diverse other.
But yearning for that kind of authentic diversity — the people who are really different — is probably a self-defeating goal. It’s self-defeating because it’s ultimately circular (it requires me to imagine the truly, radically “other” person to associate with) and it tends toward a kind of paranoid imagination (for I can always wonder whether another person is acting authentically different). And yet it’s not an unworthy goal. For I do believe in learning from difference, in seeking new perspectives and ideas and worldviews. The rub is to continue to seek difference and to learn from new perspectives while accepting that the “truly diverse” life is unattainable.
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The hero of my last year has been Judith Shklar, and she describes her book Ordinary Vices as “a tour of perplexities, not a guide for the perplexed.” She points to the value of noticing patterns and habits, even if — perhaps especially when — there's no good answer about what to do. The answer for Shklar regarding how to live in a world filled with the ordinary vices is essentially a non-answer: she implores us to exercise good judgment, to be reflective, to be aware. Virtue is about character, not any systematic political or ethical theory.
One of my original motivations for going to the Anglican church, as I wrote about last year, was to find some answer to Shklar’s challenge: how to cultivate an ethos of anti-cruelty and to minimize the ordinary vices while recognizing their inevitability. I don’t think I’ve found a particularly satisfactory answer in Christian teaching, but I have found a community with which to think through and work on these questions. And my exposure to Christianity has given me new questions to think about.
Since it’s now past the new year, I figured I ought to articulate some new goals. (For what it’s worth, my resolutions last year were wildly unsuccessful: of the 21 books I said I wanted to read, I fully read seven and partially read another three; I think I mailed around ten postcards, but I forgot to keep track; and I didn’t do any systematic thinking about my writing.)
This year, I’ll make the goal more amorphous (and thus easier to slip out of accountability for!). I want to think more about love, and I think I’ll want to do so in three separate ways.
First, I want to read about love. I read a series of sermons by Martin Luther King, Jr., that I found thought-provoking if not fully satisfactory on the power of love. I’ll try to find other books (recommendations would be appreciated!), but most immediately, I’m thinking I’ll turn to C.S. Lewis, Augustine, Arendt, Baldwin, Tolstoy, and (shudders) Plato. Also perhaps some dating books.
Second, I want to think more with others about love. I’ve begun writing down questions that I want people’s perspectives on, and so I figured I’ll just work them into conversations with friends and try to take notes. Maybe one day I’ll even write a blog post about it.
Third, I’m going to try to get into dating. We’ll see how successfully this goes.
In addition, I am going to recommit to trying to blog regularly. To be fully realistic, I don’t know if I’ll write them weekly — both due to time constraints and because life has been less interesting on a week-by-week basis than when I first got to the UK — but I will try to keep it up.
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It’s been a while since I’ve updated this blog, so let me recap some aspects of life since mid-October, when I wrote my last blog post:
October 15 — I went to a Friday prayer with a Marshall friend in the year below me. Funnily enough, she’s both in my LSE program and was placed in my Marshall “welcoming-committee group,” so I’ve gotten to know her pretty well. We went to the East London Mosque. It’s an interesting feeling to be surrounded by so many people, all doing the same thing at the same time. It reminded me of the liturgies at Catholic Mass or at the Anglican church.
October 16 — I went up to Oxford to visit a few folks and to celebrate a friend’s birthday. I hadn’t been to Oxford yet. It really feels straight out of Harry Potter, very grandiose and medieval. I went to the big art museum — the Ashmolean — and had a most moving experience looking at a mid-twentieth-century Japanese print. It depicted, in idealized forms, a mother holding her baby. I’m not sure why that piece, in particular, was moving, but I think it was the combination of its abstraction — the perfectly round heads and simplified bodies — and the look of pure, calm love on both of the figures’ faces that felt so powerful. Unfortunately they didn’t allow pictures in that exhibit, and I can’t find the piece to share.
October 19 — There was a lecture held at the Inner Temple by the Selden Society, a society dedicated to legal history. The lecturer was John Baker, who wrote the standard textbook on English legal history (and the one that I read for my politics thesis), and he gave a lecture on the life of John Selden, who played an important role in the development of habeas jurisprudence and the Petition of Right. It was a pretty cool experience. And it turns out Selden is buried in the Middle Temple itself, so I got a picture of his grave. I also ended up spending some time chatting with some of the barristers there, which was not as nice of an experience. I came away with the strong feeling that they were making conversation as a way of testing people’s intelligence rather than trying to actually learn from different perspectives.
October 23 — The friend who took me to East London Mosque took me to another event, this time a celebration of the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday. There was a lecture delivered by a Shia sheikh that I found really fascinating, and we had a good conversation on the way back about it. The lecture was about whether celebrating the Prophet’s birthday was bid’ah (an innovation) and thus unlawful under Islam. The lecturer had a very lawyerly approach to thinking through the question — he articulated the four reasons people offer to argue that celebrating the birthday is in fact unlawful, went through their textual and historical justifications, and then rejected each in turn. From an outsider’s perspective, I was struck by how much people of the same faith might differ on this question — evidently some view celebrating his birthday as strictly unlawful and thus punishable by law, whereas others think it is obligatory.
October 28–30 — The incoming Marshall cohort had its welcome week, and I also got to attend some of their events. I find these kinds of events really tiring — lots of networking-type conversations without much expectation or possibility of building longer-term connections. One nice benefit, though, is I got to meet my Marshall commissioner. The big-wigs who oversee the administration of the Marshall Scholarship are each assigned a set of Marshalls to become friends with, and my commissioner is a lord (literally! in the House of Lords!) who was a high up adviser to the Labour governments in the 1990s and 2000s. Cool stuff. Also, there was a Halloween party on the night of October 30. My friend and I went as Derry Girls — I was ostensibly Erin (hence the blonde wig), so I suppose my friend was Michelle, although we didn’t really try that hard to be specific characters. I’d never before worn a skirt (although what I had was closer to a kilt than a real skirt), so that was an interesting experience.
November 5 — I got high tea with the group of 2021 Marshalls I was assigned to welcome to London. It was very pleasant, although surprisingly difficult to coordinate. The food ended up being okay (high tea is never as good as one would hope; the ratio of sweets to savories is much too high), but it was good company. After, I went to a book talk; there was a book of hadith (sayings of the Prophet) released, and so my friend took me to see the release and to meet the authors. It was fun.
November 6 — My friends got married! My one LSE friend from last year had been in a very long term relationship, but because she finished at LSE and was going to have visa issues, they decided just to pull the trigger and do the wedding. Her and her now-husband both insisted that the “marriage ceremony” (not a wedding!) was a mere formality, so they just had around a dozen friends and did it in the Islington town center. Their misty eyes, I must report, betrayed that the ceremony seemed to be more than mere formality to them, though. It was an a heartwarming afternoon. And it was interesting to meet their friends; I was by far the youngest person (everyone else was in the late twenties or early thirties), and almost everyone else was Australian (they’re both expats) and in finance. By nature of their stage in life, everyone else was either recently married, about to get married, or very much single. I was grateful to have been invited and gotten to share the moment with them.
After the marriage ceremony, I went to Cambridge; it was one of my former flatmates’ birthdays, so I went up there to celebrate with him. We made dumplings together. The dumplings probably are not passable by the standards of a Chinese mother, but for two Americans, I’d say we did decently.
November 8 — This was the first day of my interfaith religion seminar at LSE. The basic setup was that they had four themed panels, where they brought scholars/leaders from different faith traditions and had them dialogue on a certain topic: (1) What is truth? (2) What is justice? (3) What is the good life? and (4) What is community? The first day was a lecture by the leader of the LSE Faith Centre advocating for studying “religious imaginations,” the internal perspective of a faith tradition, i.e., faith as it is experienced rather than as a mechanical sociological or political phenomenon. I thought the lecture was interesting but not perhaps fully persuasive (I think the need for understanding religious imaginations depends on the research question at hand, and for many sociological or political scientific questions, the religious imagination is not so important a cause). The rest of the panels were quite fascinating, though, because I got to hear from folks from faith traditions I have only ever really known as abstract Wikipedia concepts: Sikhism, Jainism, Greek Orthodox Christianity, Baha’i, and Buddhism. There were also plenty of people from traditions that I have comparatively more experience with (different forms of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism). One downside of the setup is that you lose some of the particularities of the religion, because people tend to want to emphasize similarities in their faith traditions. It made me want to explore religions as they are felt as an insider rather than religions as they are presented to outsiders in an interfaith space.
November 12 — The Red (Taylor’s Version) release day! A friend and I embargoed listening to the album, and then we met up over dinner and wine to listen to it through together. It was a wonderful experience. Overall: All Too Well (the ten-minute and the sad girl autumn versions) is a masterpiece; Treacherous, State of Grace (both versions), and Stay Stay Stay have all improved; a few songs were disappointing (see, especially, Holy Ground and Everything Has Changed, although in part both songs were so good to begin with that improvement is difficult).
November 13 — The LSE Methodology Department took us on a field trip. We went to Bletchley Park, where Alan Turing and the Allied codebreakers worked during World War II to decrypt German war communications, as dramatized by The Imitation Game. It was a very pleasant trip, although I was so tired after the late night of Taylor Swift listening and early morning that I didn’t take in as much as I probably should have.
November 14 — I’d been meaning to do a Random Walk for a while. The basic idea is to choose a place, walk until you hit an intersection, and then roll an n-sided dice (where n is the number of directions you can go, not including backwards) to decide where you go. I finally went on one with a friend! Our movement ended up being more linear than I expected, although we did end up going in circles in a park for a while.
November 20–27 — I had three Thanksgiving events this year, which was fun. (Ironically enough, though, I’m not sure we did formal thanks-giving at any of the three.) The first was hosted by the Anglican church I’ve been attending, although it was surprisingly diverse from a faith perspective — they invited people from many religious backgrounds, and it was a pretty secular experience beyond taking place in the basement of a church. The second was at my own place — my former flatmate came down from Cambridge and we cooked a meal together. The third was Marshall Thanksgiving, which was a lot. There were probably eighty people, and I was extremely tired that day for some reason. So I ended up doing a lot of dishes (it’s a great way to avoid having to interact very much with people).
December 1–3 — Strike! A bunch of universities across the UK were on strike, and so I didn’t go to class those days. I also joined the picket line on December 1. It was kind of fun, to be honest! I’ve never picketed before, but it’s a lot more enjoyable than canvassing: less solitary, less blatant rejection (the worst people do is walk past you, whereas with canvassing, you often get slammed doors in your face), and more opportunity to talk to random folks. I met some of the library staff at LSE, along with an LSE Government Department professor. I also saw a lot of the younger Methodology Department professors out at the picket line; it was nice to meet them in a more informal capacity and to hear insider perspectives on the department. On December 1, I also met up with my other former flatmate (he’s still living in London, in his own apartment), and we cooked a meal together. I went to Winter Wonderland, a Christmas-themed county fair basically, on December 2. I’d say it was mediocre (very cold, very expensive, not super interesting stuff to do), although I enjoyed thinking about the various games; the friend I was with was very astute and able to figure out how the games tricked you into thinking they were easier than they are.
December 6–10 — This was the last week I was in town, so it was filled with lots of friends, coffee, and good food. Here are some pictures from around London that week:
December 10–now — I went on a trip to the East Coast and then came home! I started in DC, because I’d really missed DC (it was the first time I’ve been since 2018). In 2018, I left the city feeling very inspired: I was surrounded by really passionate and smart people working on issues that I felt mattered, and it made me very confident that I wanted to go back for my career. This time, I felt more ambivalent about the city, but I was still glad to see old friends. I also felt like a lot of the monuments were a lot more powerful this time around, especially the MLK, Lincoln, and American Veterans Disabled for Life Memorials.
After that, I spent a few days in New York City. I liked the city a lot more than I thought I would. Last time I was in DC/NYC, I felt New York was overwhelming but DC was much more manageable; this time, I thought the opposite. In New York, I got to meet up with a lot of old high school friends, as well as a really close Pomona friend, which was all around a lovely experience. I wandered through downtown, seeing Chinatown, the Thurgood Marshall Courthouse, and the World Trade Center. I saw the High Line, got a glorious egg bagel, ate lots of pizza (99 cents!), and went to a poetry event (out of character, am I right?).
Next, I went to Boston, which I’d never really explored before and found myself loving. Here, too, were many friends from high school and college. Two of my high school friends just had a kid, and he is ADORABLE. We spent a lot of time playing with the five-month-old baby. We also went for a walk in a nearby graveyard, where I saw the graves of (among others) Charles Sumner, John Rawls, and Joseph Story. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find Judith Shklar! A friend took me to a few mosques in the area, and I also had some soul food. Great stuff.
I ended my East Coast trip going to Buffalo, to see a quasi-college friend whom I hadn’t seen since 2018. It was a lovely time meeting her family, exploring the local area, seeing Niagara Falls (it was cold), stumbling through Taylor Swift songs on piano with her on violin, and otherwise relaxing.
I then came back to Oregon (after a twelve-hour layover in Chicago O’Hare — I’m truly bad at travel planning), and have been spending time with family ever since. I did a daytrip down to San Jose to help my brother pack on January 5 and got to see an old Pomona friend.
Somewhat miraculously, throughout all of this travel, I still haven’t gotten covid (although it’s of course possible that I caught it and my lateral flow tests didn’t detect/haven’t detected it).
I won’t bother with rose/bud/thorns this time, but things I’m grateful for:
Friends — I’m grateful for those who have welcomed me, who have counseled me, who have introduced me to new cultures and ideas, who have challenged me, who tolerate my love of Taylor Swift, who think through ethical and theological questions with me, who teach me, who argue with me about politics, who share coffee with me, who show me new places, who introduce me to their families, communities, and loved ones, who cook with me, who read books with me: who make life good.
Family — Benedict Anderson once argued that the power of nationalism stems from its assumption: that one is of and has obligations to a nation is a taken-for-granted fact. I think our family assumes to take care of and look out for each other, and I am grateful for that familial love.
Vaccines.
Future posts: I have two posts that are planned and just need to be written (one on corporations and one on Derry Girls).