Exodoxa
Walden, 165 Years After Thoreau
Harvard’s educational philosophy is—explicitly and otherwise—communal, even cooperative. We spend our time here in Houses and dining halls, with our blocking groups and advising tutors, networking away. On the one hand, our connections to others are probably the best thing we can take away from our time in college. Certainly J.K. Rowling agreed when she told Harvard seniors that what she wished them most of all at graduation was what she had herself: “The friends with whom I sat on graduation day have been my friends for life… at our graduation we were bound by enormous affection, by our shared experience of a time that could never come again, and, of course, by the knowledge that we held certain photographic evidence that would be exceptionally valuable if any of us ran for Prime Minister.” No matter how we pad our curricula vitae (or, better yet, shape our minds), our experience here is deeply defined by the community we live with: both its many flaws and its great beauty. (I hope. Otherwise, I may politely suggest that you might be Doing It Wrong.)
God and Rhetoric at the Convention
This is also true of our two major political parties. Republicans sometimes attack Democrats for not mentioning God and imply a special favor He has for their own party, despite His recent predilection for sending hurricanes to their conventions. Yet the Democrats certainly use religion in their rhetoric from time to time. This week’s convention was telling, as the Democrats ultimately didn’t stray too far from religion—at least in words. They initially voted the word “God” (as well as some references to Jerusalem as the capital of Israel) out of their platform at the convention but scurried to put it back in after the decision generated controversy (“Oops!”). As always, there was prayer and the usual asking God to bless the country. Obama quoted the scripture in his acceptance speech, and most of all he talked about one of his favorite one-word slogans, hope—“…not blind optimism or wishful thinking, but hope in the face of difficulty, hope in the face of uncertainty, that dogged faith in the future which has pushed this nation forward, even when the odds are great, even when the road is long.” By the end of his speech he was cataloguing the things about America that gave him hope—homeless students excelling, factories making sacrifices for their workers, injured veterans on new artificial legs.
“Are You Suicidal?”
In contrast to the treatment that I received at UMHS, the recommended dose for those who are diagnosed with depression or anxiety and recommended for cognitive-behavioral therapy (one of the most common types of therapy) is one to two hours of contact with their therapist a week—four to eight times more than what UMHS offered. Of course, nearly every student can repeat some story of a bungled treatment at UHS—most especially of waiting. But what is remarkable about mental health services in particular is that rationing such services means not that students have to wait for the proper treatment, but that they aren’t ever getting the right dose. Mental heath therapy works like chemotherapy treatments—getting the full amount over the right period of time is key. My case is far from unique and one of the least serious I’ve heard of. Other friends have been pressured to leave the system after a certain amount of time, or substitute student-run counseling services, or take medication instead.
The Productivity of Social Space
Then I began to appreciate the combination. When I asked students how they’d met, their most common response was something like “well, erm, I dunno, I guess I hang out in the pub, and so does she.” There didn’t have to be much else in common—no club, extracurricular, ethnicity, or assigned place of residence—just a common space to go at night.
Complex Gender Alignment
The remarkable success of such surgery is a medical and humanist victory. But interestingly, it presents, at least at the surface, a challenge to some models of traditional feminism. This stems from the contradiction between the idea that people are innately a certain gender and the traditional feminist view that gender is—at least in large part—socially created and imposed. The most famous intellectual proponent of this idea is Judith Butler, who writes in her work “Undoing Gender” that gender is simply “doing, incessantly performed.” In other words, it is not one’s genitalia that make one a particular gender, but rather one’s behavior, constructed through some combination of unconscious absorption of societal standards, embodied performance, and conscious personal choice. Butler’s theory is liberating in many ways. It discards the notion that seemingly effeminate men or masculine women are unnatural or wrong; it opens all avenues of gender-related self-expression to all people. But the existence of transgender people, and the success rate of realignment surgery, does not square with the idea that gender is simply a social and personal construction. If so, why would some people in the same society not be constructed into conformity with their physical form like the rest? Why would they choose to construct themselves as something so agonizingly deviant that it would make them suicidal? Why would surgery almost never cause regret if gender can be constructed and thus re-constructed?
