Roses, Buds, and Thorns
- Isaac Cui
- Nov 6, 2020
- 7 min read
I don’t have a thematic post today — I think I’ll want to write about the election but I want to be mindful that quick takes before a full count is in can be very dubious. Better to wait at least another week, I think, before trying to write the “narrative” (if such a concept is even coherent) of the election. So instead, I figure I’ll write an extended rose/bud/thorn this week. Plus, you’ll get an extra thematic post sometime this week (see below about “Letters”).
* * * * *
Roses:
Last Friday afternoon, I got to meet another Marshall in London, and we explored the Camden Market area and then walked to Regent’s Park. (Turns out it’s a really cool part of town — very bustling, filled with art and life, right along a canal.) I’ve found meeting other Marshalls to be a uniformly positive experience: everyone is fascinating, and insightful, and passionate, and easy to talk to, and a bit intimidating. But I came away from that Friday afternoon with that rare feeling that I had found a really good person, someone who really deeply thought about how to be good and how to live a good life and who also lived it accordingly.
I’ve been thinking over this last week, off-and-on, about what made her leave such a strong impression. I’m not sure I have a good answer, but there were certain aspects of how she spoke (and what she spoke about) that were striking: she was measured when talking about others but firm (perhaps even strict) when reflecting on her own experiences; she articulated strong moral principles and asked probing, maybe even pointed, questions about their application to my decisions, but I never felt judged or under duress; she was blunt about humans’ capacity to be good, but she wasn’t defeatist and, indeed, had helpful and functional thoughts about how to deal with those shortcomings; she was genuine and open about her own vices but simultaneously showed a kind of gratitude in explaining how others help hold her to account for those vices. It’s not often, I think, that you meet someone for the first time and yet end up reflecting on the importance of grace, the dangers of pride, or our capacity for dishonesty.
I think a downside of spending a lot of time meeting people is that the conversations can tend to be impersonal, in that you might discuss academic ideas or reflections on the place around you (“so how about that rain storm, huh?”). But, to make the point stronger, I think when you discuss yourself in these circumstances, you tend to do so in a facial way — a kind of outward-facing self-reflection that enables (self-)deception, for the listener doesn’t know you and, out of politeness, wouldn’t want to contradict your portrayal of yourself. There’s a way in which these kinds of meetings feel like interviews — “so what’s your passion?”; “tell me about what you’re studying?” — which, like personal statements, encapsulate who you are but only in the ways you want to reveal. You sand the rough edges, smoothing out your personality to be more appealing and interesting and good, rather than reveling in their jaggedness. I don’t think these kinds of meetings are bad; I’m actually very grateful for the opportunity to meet new people, whether Marshalls, LSE folks, or otherwise. But it is a special kind of interaction, where you’re usually wearing some kind of mask. It’s a special experience to meet someone who doesn’t seem to be wearing that mask and whose true colors nevertheless seem profoundly good. Here are some pictures I took from our walk.
The next day was Halloween, a holiday that, it turns out, is really big in the UK as well as the United States. I didn’t do any trick-or-treating (both because COVID and because I’m boring), but the Physics Department at Pomona did do a cute get together where alumni were invited. It was a wonderful experience to get to see so many folks again and to hear how Zoom University is going. I also think it was a helpful reminder about the nature of community and roots in a time of the Internet. There is an idea in The Discourse at Pomona where we say that students are necessarily transitory and so the only enduring entities at the College are faculty and some staff. Campus politics, at least among students, become riddled by this odd process of collective forgetting, where older students pass down impressions to younger students (“[x administrator] sucks and doesn’t care about [y group]”; “[z institution] systematically fails students”) and leave them with some kind of gut, emotive bias without a more holistic factual basis for what actually happened. I also think that students involved in campus politics might feel more willing to engage in scorched-earth tactics by the sense that they are transitory — that they’ll leave soon and, as such, do not feel obligated as repeat players to employ the kind of forbearance that you see among faculty in intra-departmental politics. The Halloween event (“Phalloween”) helped remind me that the question whether one becomes transitory is one determined by decisions, not metaphysical law. For community-building and root-maintaining is more about time and commitment than it is about physical space or proximity. That’s, I think, both the magic and downside of a Zoom-based social life; it exposes to us just how much is in our control and thus how much is our responsibility.
I was initially planning on going to Cambridge to visit a few friends on Thursday (yesterday), but with the announcement of a lockdown in England, I moved the trip up to Tuesday. I think it was a good decision, in that it helped distract me from doom-scrolling through Twitter all day on Election Day (before any votes would be coming in!). But more importantly, it was an amazing time to get to see my friends in person. They’re both at Churchill College in Cambridge, so they showed me around the premises, and we also walked around downtown. It turns out there’s a graveyard right by their houses, so we explored that space — and ran into the grave of Ludwig Wittgenstein! We also got some good Italian food, which was very heart-warming (figuratively, since I was hungry and got to enjoy the food with good friends, and literally, since I was very cold), saw a beautiful rainbow, and walked by some beautiful buildings. Plus, I got a funny picture of my friend with a pumpkin she carved.
Buds:
I’m hopeful that we’ll have a peaceful resolution to the election and an orderly transition of power (since it looks likely that Biden will win Pennsylvania, if not also Nevada and Georgia, at the time I’m writing this). I’m grateful that Election Day itself seemed to go by without any violence (honestly a bit of a surprise, given that there were meaningful indications of potential violence). Our elections administration system is dysfunctionally decentralized at times, but one of the benefits of this splintering of power is that it’s very, very hard to imagine how an individual (e.g., the President of the United States) could “rig” the election. (Rick Hasen tweeted something similar to this sentiment earlier today; if you aren’t already following him on Twitter or Election Law Blog, I would definitely recommend him.)
Also, in response to lockdown and because my flatmate and I are nerds, we’re going to write posts that I’m calling “Letters.” The idea is that we’ll read a book each week and then write a series of letters to each other about it. I think this will shape up to be somewhat similar to my thematic blog posts, which have been fairly centered on specific readings. Our first book is Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, and next week’s will be Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth.
Going into lockdown isn’t the most exciting of things, but I think it’s really important given how poorly England, especially, is doing with COVID. But there are bright sides to lockdown. For one, under our lockdown rules, we’re allowed to go to parks with up to one other person from outside our household. So, in other words, I get a nice justification to do one-on-one meetings with friends in parks, and that’ll be fun! Additionally, our flat will be making fun (perhaps terrible-for-your-health) foods under lockdown. I’ll be trying to make sandwich bread later today, and we’ll try making an apple pie and grilled cheese donuts (will they be disgusting? amazing? who knows!) soon.
Thorns:
My first thorn, of course, is Miami-Dade County and the pains of watching Florida (and also election night generally). The UK is five hours ahead of the East Coast, and so we had to stay up pretty late before numbers even began coming in. (The unfortunate reality is that we also spend many of our daylight hours refreshing the New York Times and FiveThirtyEight without any updates.) The election has also just made it difficult to concentrate on anything else, which is why this post is coming late. The lucky coincidence is my reading week was this week, so I didn’t get hurt in school by these shenanigans.
Another thorn is that our third flatmate left for India on Tuesday to go home for the holidays (translation: all of November and December). The flat feels emptier and quieter as a result, which is especially unfortunate because we’ll also have social activities become much more limited under lockdown.
Potential future topics:
* What is culture, is it a helpful concept, and what might I think of as my own culture? I’m thinking of these questions because of Patrick Deneen’s critique, in Why Liberalism Failed, of how liberalism breeds an anti-culture and also conversations we had in our BLM reading group about whether the concept of “white culture” is coherent and/or unhelpful.
* Should we be worried about rational choice theory or political psychology and the ways that those theories might naturalize ideas about, say, human self-interestedness or inherent group-based tension?
* Is election forecasting useful? Is it good for democracy?
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