Quaker Ponies, Part II: I have called you friends

"I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master's business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you". John 15:15
"If you meet me in the road, kill me." Buddha to his disciples

I remember an evening years ago on the porch of my Quaker meeting house in Maryland, discussing Thomas Kelly's A Testament of Devotion. A well-respected Quaker said she couldn't decide her opinion of the book. Why not, we asked? She would have to meet Thomas Kelly first, she said, and evaluate the man before she could evaluate his work. 

This, I think, lies at the heart at what encourages Quaker "poniness." A Quaker "pony"--pony rhymes with another word--is someone who professes more than he or she possesses, someone who pretends.

Poniness particularly stabs at the heart of Quakerism because we stake so much on integrity. Much of our identity lies in plain speaking and honest acting, saying what we mean and meaning what we say. We strive to be the same inside as out. 

But in a faith group that levels hierarchy, that has no paid priesthood and no accepted path to ordination that sets some apart as leaders and sages, we face the same problem as the Friend who didn't know what to think of Thomas Kelly: How do we decide who to emulate?  Whose wisdom should we trust and follow? How do we find our elders, mentors, and wise counselors?

In absence of other criteria, it often comes down to personality and presentation. Who presents best as a Quaker? Which person seems like one of us? Who most conforms to our image of what a wise or weighty Quaker should be? 

If you have been around Quakers any length of time, you know how a wise, weighty Friend is supposed to look, dress and sound. Weighty Friends speak in a quiet voice, reflecting the peace inside their souls. (How many times do elderly Friends have to ask weighty Friends to speak up?) Weighty Friends are serious and filled with gravitas. They speak slowly. They support the right kind of causes, preferably heavily tilted toward the ecological and social justice. They use the right language of Light, Peace and Love. They clerk Quaker committees. Ideally, they show up to conferences in a Priuses--or having hiked or biked with their tent in tow and wearing all natural fabrics.

Woe to the woman who wears too much makeup. Woe to the man who drives up in a Cadillac or talks too fast. Woe to John Woolman when he showed up in a white hat when white hats were disdained as a worldly fashion statement. His fellow Quakers condemned him on appearances, although he was following the simplicity testimony.

When everything rides on how you outwardly present, the temptation to become a "pony" can become intense. 

But how do we discern our mentors and elders if not by how they present--doesn't the mature soul in touch with the Divine Source shine outward like a light? Yes--and so do ponies. 

At a conference I recently attended, someone came into a workshop all aglow and announced with great excitement she had just found a new "mentor" to "guide her." The mentor, I thought, looked very much like her. Is she creating an echo chamber, I wondered, surrounding herself with people who mirror back herself?  How, after all, at the end of a one-day workshop could she know the soul--really know the soul--of a person she'd just met? Wasn't she responding, however sincerely, to an appearance?

Herein lies the real issue: should we be looking for elders or mentors at all? Some might rise up naturally to fill that role--but should we be seeking these people or trying, self-consciously, to be that person? After all, didn't Jesus himself explicitly shed that role? Didn't he tell his disciples, in plain language, don't look to me as master or mentor, but look to me as a friend? Didn't he say he had already given the disciples-- us-- what they/we needed? Didn't Buddha command his own followers to do essentially what Jesus enacted: If you see me in the road, kill me? Jesus let himself be killed. Buddha commanded, "kill me." 

Jesus said treat me as a friend, not a superior. Don't we need to pay attention to what he was trying to communicate?

Both Jesus and Buddha told people to be real. "I have called you friends" is simply a continuation of Jesus' admonition that his disciples not be constantly jockeying for position. To jockey for position almost inevitably leads us to become ponies. Because in the end, humbling as it might be, we're really not better than anyone else.

I admit to a certain weariness in attending Quaker events where people either try to be elders or hunt out elders. We border at times perilously close to a cult of personality. How much desperately needed wisdom and guidance do we miss because we spend too much time evaluating what "we" think of person A, instead of listening to what that person has to say? What if Thomas Kelly actually had been a jerk: Does that mean God couldn't use him as a messenger? Mightn't we have been called on the love him all the more?

The real secret hidden in plain sight is that we all fail and soar at times. No one can possibly be an elder every single of second of his life and nobody who relies wholly on another human can fail to be disappointed. 

But we can all be friends.

Could this explain Quaker stagnation?

This is from theverge.com, originally from a Washington Post story. People would apparently rather give themselves electric shocks than sit with their own thoughts.

One caveat may make this study flawed: More men than women gave themselves repeated electric shocks. I wonder, given the machismo in our society, if the men--and some women-- actually got engaged in testing their pain endurance. In other words, was sitting in silence so odious that they would hurt themselves to avoid it or was sitting in silence not so bad, but less interesting than the  positive reinforcement feedback loop--a proof of masculinity (even in women)--created in withstanding repeated shocks? Were the participants so desperate to avoid their own thoughts they would do anything to escape them--or was the shocking a fascinating test?

"The experiment was simple. All the participants had to do was enter an empty room, sit down, and think for six to 15 minutes. But without a cellphone, a book, or a television screen to stare at, the assignment quickly became too much to handle. In fact, even when individuals were given time to "prepare" for being alone — meaning that they were able to plan what they would think about during their moments of solitude — the participants still "found it hard," Timothy Wilson, a psychologist at the University of Virginia and lead author of the study, told The Washington Post. "People didn’t like it much."

THEY COULD SHOCK THEMSELVES AS OFTEN AS THEY LIKED

So the researchers decided to give each participant the option of doing something else, besides just thinking. But what they came up with wasn’t exactly pleasant because, instead of just sitting there, participants were now also allowed to shock themselves as many times as they liked with a device containing a 9 volt battery. Still, for many, that option seemed like a better deal.

Most of the people who decided to shock themselves did so seven times. These results baffled the researchers. "I mean, no one was going to shock themselves by choice," Wilson, told The Washington Post in reference to his initial position during the conception of the study, published yesterday in Science. One man even gave himself 190 electric shocks over a period of 15 minutes, Wilson told The Atlantic, but his data points weren’t included in the final analysis. "I’m still just puzzled by that."

ONE GUY USED THE DEVICE 190 TIMES

Still, the fact that they chose to shock themselves at all, on their own, was unexpected. And this had nothing to do with curiosity about what the shocks would feel like, because the researchers made sure that each individual received a shock before the beginning of the session.

Yet, people voluntarily shocking themselves repeatedly wasn’t the only surprise. According to the researchers, men showed a marked preference for the negative stimulation. Out of 24 women, only six decided to shock themselves, but 12 out of the 18 male participants figured electric shocks were worthwhile. This, the researchers hypothesize, might have to do with the fact that men appear to be more willing to take risks for the sake of a intense and complex experiences than women.

The results of this study are tentative, however, and the sample sizes — a total of 11 experiments that included between 40 and 100 university students each — were fairly small, so researchers will need to repeat them. But for now, it would appear that humans, especially men, seem to prefer receiving negative, even painful stimulation, to suffering through the bouts of obligatory "mind-wandering" — which you could also call "boredom," depending on how you want to look at it."

The study was very small too. Yet if people can't bear sitting with their own thoughts--or in the Inner Light--for even a few minutes, this is food for thought. I believe the world desperately needs to get still and sit in the Light, but it may be that we are throwing people who really can't swim into the deep end of the pool without a life preserver when we ask them to jump into an hour of silence. 

Ethics and Education: Dreaming of a better way

Why are there not more higher education conferences that bring together instructors across disciplines to discuss the ethics of education? How do we overcome our cynicism to make this possible?

Last Friday, Saturday and Sunday, Roger and I attended the Friends Association for Higher Education Conference, held this year at Haverford College. The theme was "Exploring Right Relationships."

From the moment of the plenary address Friday morning, on justice, given by Sarah Willie-LeBreton, I knew I had arrived at the right place. How do we bring as many people as possible to the table?

The Haverford campus is exceptionally beautiful: but why not a place
 like this for every student in the United States? 

The Haverford campus is especially beautiful, breathtakingly so. But part of me wonders: all this privilege for 1,200 students? I am glad those who attend the college can do so--I know some of these students--but I echo a question that ran through the conference: how do we promote the best sort of education, one that like Haverford's addresses the whole person? Instead of constant budget cuts and degrading facilities, lack of staff and resources, why not envision a United States dotted every few miles with such beautiful campuses as Haverford's serving K-12, not to mention college students? In the age of the one-room schoolhouse, the modern high school with multiple classrooms, a library, science labs, art rooms, stages, gyms and showers must have seemed as much a dream, if not more so. And yet at one time, we managed that leap forward. We are so much richer a country now: if we wanted to do, we could leap forward again. Yet all I hear are the voices shouting this down. 

Conversations at the conference offered hope. Every session I attended was excellent, but three stand out. Philosophy professor Laura J. Rediehs led a workshop based on an essay she wrote that the won a 2012 Carnegie foundation award answering the question: What is the  biggest problem facing the world today?

She wrote that our problems stem from using economics rather than ethics as the primary basis for decision making. She invited all of us into a discussion about how to bring ethics back into first place, especially in education, where getting a good job currently seems to be the only rationale for going to college.  

Her essay can be found here: https://www.carnegiecouncil.org/publications/articles_papers_reports/0139. The other essays that won along with hers were also good, I thought. I am planning now to use these essays in a course I will teach later in the summer. 

Julie Meadows, who shared a session with me, spoke of people advancing in academe by tearing other people down. Why is the academic world so cynical? Why can't we build on the foundation of each other's work, she asked? Having done my share of tearing down, I am thinking about what she had to say: certainly we need to hold each other to rigorous standards, but can we find more creative and supportive ways to do so?

Jeffrey Dudiak talked about getting beyond modernist perceptions of Quakerism that permeate both liberal and orthodox Friends to arrive at a wisdom that bridges our divides. 

I found the conference's meetings for worship Spirit-led and Spirit-suffused. Being in such a love-saturated environment helped me to recognize what a routinely cynical world I inhabit--so routine that it seems "normal" to constantly puncture everything. But it is deranged to live this way, so quick to knock down everything, a symptom, I think, of our profound fear of hope--and  I am part of the problem. My hope--and I will have hope, foolish as it sounds, is that some of spirit of possibility, of realistic sincerity, of a way forward that dreams of abundance for everyone, can be infused into this weary world. 

Yet I want to raise the question: how do we get beyond the cynicism that permeates our discourse? 

In Bruges: A Quakerly movie

At a critical point in Martin McDonagh's 2008 comedy In Bruges, one of the hit men lays down his gun.  It's a moment of complete surrender and the culmination of a transformation: this man refuses to participate in the cycle of "kill or be killed" that has defined his life.

Two hitmen are sent to Bruges. The city is a character.

Beneath its comic surface--and it can appreciated merely as a funny movie--In Bruges emerges as profoundly spiritual.  

The plot jumps into motion when the "boss" sends two Irish hit men, one remarkably dense, to Bruges, in Belgium, to escape after a hit gone awry. Bruges during the Christmas season enwraps the twosome in a magical setting of canals and churches. Repeatedly referred to as a "fairytale city," Bruges becomes a place where a fairytale--or more precisely, parable--will be enacted, one that raises profound questions about life and death, guilt and innocence, hell and redemption. The Bruges setting, a medieval city replete with churches and Christian artwork that the killers "kill" time viewing, becomes a part of the film's religious mediation. The much maligned Western tradition has riches to offer us, and, literally, a new perspective, if only we have eyes to see. 

In In Bruges, paintings become part of the story. This is Bosch's Last Judgment, which our "heroes" talk about. Western civilization has a tradition to offer us. Not by accident is the movie set at Christmastime. 

I don't want to provide spoilers or give away what makes the movie compelling, as I hope people will watch it. It is worth seeing if only for the lovely Bruges, the scenes set within the jarring context of a diminished language that fails to blind us to its beauty.

In a particularly Christlike sequence, one person dies to save another--an other who some might say has no right to live. We die for other people, the movie says, not because of the past--the past is never worth dying for--but for the sake of a future we cannot see and which may never come to be.  

Though far better, this movie reminded me of The Grand Budapest Hotel. Both are whimsical comedies in fairytale settings, where scenery evokes far more than it says. But Budapest sadly lacks Bruges humanity. Bruges, like Budapest, comes from a male perspective--women in Bruges are sex objects (pregnant, prostitutes, or sexually available young women)--but unlike in Budapest, they are not held up to ridicule or cruelty. Ironic, though the movie is about hitmen, we never see casual killing in Bruges. In Budapest we do, when a group of prison guards are murdered without a second thought, though as part of madcap, "light-hearted" prison break caper. Budapest, too, though named for a city, exists in a location out of place and time, an ephemeral moral limbo. 

Women are sex objects in In Bruges, but are not humiliated.

 Bruges, in contrast, is located precisely in history. It reflects on life and death--and suggests, through the rich medieval paintings it shows, that Bruges offers a the perceptive viewer an entree into the West's long meditation on meaning--and even, subversively, hints at the reality of hell.

But it is not a movie about fire and brimstone--it is a movie about hope.  

Quaker "Ponies" part I

Let’s say that every summer Roger and I go to a Quaker “camp.” Every summer, “George,” let’s say, greets me with a smile and big hug. He remembers the names of my three children and asks after them. Then he sits down with me in one of the pairs of  colorful Adirondack chairs scattered around the camp’s lawn and asks how I am doing—and I tell him. He listens intently, nods sympathetically.

Naturally, I like George. But by year three at this camp, I begin to notice something: George’s friendly greeting seems, well, canned: same smile, same hug, same exact question about my three children and same period of seemingly intent listening in the Adirondack chairs. Everything's fine, but our relationship seems just as distant as it was when we first met, as if George is using all his friendliness to try to keep me at bay. 

That year, George invites a popular group of people to go into the nearby mountain town to listen to a talk about poetry. I am standing there too—and George, after all our conversations, surely remembers I am a literature person—but he pointedly doesn’t invite me after carefully inviting everyone else by name. Does he not want me to come or has he forgotten after all our conversations that I would love to go to a talk on Auden? Either way, I wander off.  

A week later, back at home, over breakfast, I ask Roger about George, knowing that Roger has always instinctively veered away from him. “He’s so friendly to me at the camp," I begin, "but I also start to get the impression he could care less if I lived or died. He always wants to hear what I have to say—and even got me an alternative to blueberry muffins the first year  [I am allergic to blueberries]—but he doesn’t seem to see me as a real person. Why does he do this? Why does he always act so glad to see me, almost overjoyed, if he doesn’t care about me? Why bother? I am no power. I am a nobody. I am not a weighty Friend.”

Roger stares at me as if to say, “how could somebody so smart be so stupid?” “Don’t you get it?” he asks.

“No.”

“George is a word that rhymes with pony.”

A word that rhymes with pony. “Oh. That word.”

“Yes. A Quaker pony.”

It all falls into place. George is a good guy, but ultimately, at least in relating to me, he is a  … pony. And I realize he is not the only Quaker pony I've met. 

I think about this for a long time because I wonder why it is so hard for me to connect Quakers with  … ponyness. I wonder if I, too, am unwittingly, a pony.  It occurs to me that perhaps this is especially a concern for Quakers to grapple with, as “professing what you don’t possess--” another formulation for being a “pony”-- is particularly at odds with the Quaker testimony of plain speaking and plain dealing. So why do we do it? Why aren't we more honest? And yet ...

I think back, however, to a few summers ago at the same camp, when a cosseted young birthright Friend responded to a new Friend by stating “You know what? I don’t like you.” This new person, although good-hearted soul, had a nervous habit of saying borderline mean things as “jokes.” The Friend was right to be annoyed, but telling him she didn’t like him, if honest, was hurtful and not helpful. (It might have been better to say I don’t like it when you tell those ”jokes.”) In any case, an awkward few seconds passed, everyone as riveted as if she had slapped him, until he saved himself through abjection, saying, “You wouldn’t be the first one not to like me.”

So, “letting it all hang out” can also be destructive to community. Civility, gentleness and compassion matter. Surely we want to avoid being brutal, cruel and thoughtless.

But as I think back to “George,” I wonder, if, as is clear, he was fairly indifferent to me—which is fine, as we can’t all love everybody—why he went out of his way to pretend otherwise, to offer what might be deemed an excess of civility?

More next time, but any insights are welcome.

End of part I

Thee or Thou continued

Ask and ye (or you) shall receive. Not only have Micah Bales and Marshall Massey offered wisdom, Gerald Grant provides a link to a 1938 article by Kenneth Morse that seems the definitive word on plain speaking grammar at: http://quakerjane.com/spirit.friends/spirituality-kspeech.html.

Kenneth Morse in plain dress 1944.
HT: Quaker Jane, who also provided the link to his article.
Morse taught at Olney Friends School.

The consensus--or unity--position seems to be that Quaker plain speech derives from a northern English dialect that never used thou as a subject. As do plain speaking Quakers today, the Yorkshire people used thee for both subject and object and conjugated the corresponding verb in the third person singular. So, the phrase "Is thee going to the meeting?" is entirely grammatical within the context of this dialect.

Yorkshire, where "thee" reigned supreme.

The "thou art" formulations of the King James bible derive from the Midlands dialect.

The King James bible does not use Quaker plain speech.

I found Morse's article quite interesting.

Belle, racism, Quakers, Austen

In Amma Asante's movie Belle, as in history, Dido Elizabeth Belle is the mixed-race daughter of a white English admiral. A relative, Lord Mansfield, Lord Chief Justice of Britain, raises Dido as a lady, and almost, but not quite, an equal to whites. (Fit for Freedom, not for Friendship, the book documenting that ambivalent relationship of white abolitionist Quakers in America to blacks comes to mind as one watches the film.) I find Belle an important movie.

A portrait of Dido Belle and Lady Elizabeth Murray,
portrayed in the movie as Dido's cousin, inspired Asante to make the film.
The portrait depicts both Dido and Elizabeth dressed in silks and jewelry,
posed as equals, unlike most depictions of blacks gazing adoringly at whites.

On a discussion list I participate in, WomenWritersthroughtheAges, one person commented that she found the film a whitewash: it presents an individual act of compassion toward a black person in a way that shows whites off well and glosses over the systemic horror of slavery.  At times, I too felt I was peering through the looking glass into a Wonderland that never existed, a place too good, the  "picture of perfection" that Jane Austen said in a letter to her niece, "make[s] me sick and wicked." 

Dido with Lord Mansfield at his almost impossibly beautiful English estate.

And yet the movie doesn't exonerate whites on the issue of slavery, for central to the story is the horrific reality of the Zong, a slave ship that carried too many Africans with too little crew. Realizing that much of the "cargo" was diseased and might die or be unsaleable, the ship's captain had the blacks chained together and thrown into the ocean to drown. That way the stakeholders could collect the insurance money, which would be unavailable should the Africans die or be too sick to sell after landing.

This illustrates the Zong, though here the captives are not chained together. The movie never depicts the massacre.

The insurance company, however, refuses to pay, asserting the ship's crew had no business throwing out a valuable cargo to collect the insurance. The ship owners counter that drinking water had been in short supply and the crew had to jettison the Africans to save themselves. A lower court decides in favor of the ship owners and the insurance company appeals, leading the case to land in the hands of Lord Mansfield, Dido's guardian.

Thus, an immoral act, perpetrated in pursuit of profit, supported as legal by the lower courts, becomes central to the movie. The uncertainty about whether or not justice will triumph over a legal system weighted to protect property rights emerges as the core conflict of the film. As soon as the legal case enters, it becomes difficult to retreat from the horror of systemic injustice into the rarified world of the English upper class, for the horror is at the core of what supports the wealthy and leisured. 

The film highlights systemic racial injustice, for it never suggests this mass murder is a rogue incident, as was the case, say, presented about the Abu Ghraib torture: Belle emphasizes that the drowning incident emerges from a larger system of injustice. Further, the drowning incident ties racism explicitly to the profit motive. Never does the movie leave us in any doubt that pursuit of money motivates the unspeakable cruelty that occurs. And going even further, the movie explicitly states that not only is  pursuit of profit a goal of the ship owners, as well as the insurance company, but the nation as a whole. We do not witness a case about a greedy shipowner versus a greedy insurance company, but glimpse a narrative about the basis of Britain's wealth. The movie makes explicit that many found it justifiable to ruthlessly drown hundreds of innocent people to support Britannia's comfort and prosperity. Thus, the movie ties racist ideology to a pursuit of profit that knows no humane bounds. We have racism, the movie says,  because it is profitable. This is important to note, because we often are led to believe that racism is either inherent or something that fell out of the sky. It bears repeating that money is behind racism.

Belle and Elizabeth lead a beautiful life supported by the slave trade.

Quakers are actually mentioned once in the movie. During the court scene in which Lord Mansfield decides the Zong case, someone worries that Quakers will "infiltrate" the courtroom. While that was unlikely, the 1783 case was important to Quaker history for it finally inspired London Yearly Meeting to formally oppose the slave trade. The meeting presented an anti-slave trade petition signed by 273 Friends to Parliament that year. One wonders what took the British Quakers so long, but as Howard D. Weinbrot outlines in his book Literature, Religion and the Evolution of Culture, the English in the eighteenth century feared the Quakers, along with other Dissenters, Jews and Catholics as the kind of "infiltraters" the movie alludes to, ready to subvert the British order and substitute an alien social system. One can imagine the Quakers spending much of the eighteenth century trying to convince the general population that they were not plotting the next revolution, and only near the end of the century--at least, before the French Revolution--being ready to jump into the abolition cause.

American Quaker Benezet travelled to England to campaign against the slave trade. 

Getting back to Belle, the domestic drama mirrors the national drama. On the domestic scene,  as on the mercantile, money is what counts, and the movie likens the marriage market to the slave market.

Belle has a large inheritance: despite being black, she gets a marriage offer from the second son of a landed, aristocratic family almost immediately upon coming out. In contrast, the white, and not just white, but fair skinned, blond, blue-eyed Elizabeth is rejected by the older son of the same family when it becomes clear she has no dowry. As soon as money comes into the picture, comically, the mother of the landed family immediately becomes not a racist. 

However, race speaks too: clearly, the family Belle proposes to marry into will treat her as second class. Like the slave traders, the landed family is out to strip Dido of her wealth and the movie strongly suggests that the older son will brutally rape her as soon as the opportunity arises.  Money, whether through the marriage market or the slave trade, draws darker and lighter skinned people together, and yet, as long as exploitation is the white person's motivator, blacks will get the worst of it. The domestic drama works tightly to underscore the national story. Only as Belle meets someone, who like her, wants something other than money can a better domestic future be imagined for Belle. Systemically, only as Lord Mansfield, albeit for ostensibly non-idealistic and narrow reasons, sides with the insurers (though the movie strongly implies he is influenced by moral concerns) do we get cracks in a system of legal injustice.

The movie strongly suggests that the older brother of Dido's fiance will brutally rape her, given the chance. The older brother is the shorter figure on the left. The fiance,  on the right, will marry her for her money.

The movie has been likened to a Jane Austen novel, and we can see the parallels, especially to Mansfield Park, in a young girl adopted into a wealthy family as a not quite equal. We can see too the concern for money, especially on the marriage market, as reminiscent of Austen. More importantly, Belle suggests Austen in all the ways minute domestic injustices can be read  as stand ins for larger social injustices. This movie be viewed as a feel good costume drama. It can be understood as a comforting, familiar narrative, in which whites, good and compassionate and moral, overturn the evils of racism on both systemic and personal levels. Or it can be read as troubling drama in which the profit motive is, both in the marriage market and the larger markets in which capital flows globally, the root of human misery. 

This profit motive still reigns supreme in the world today and continues to lead to ideologies that distort human relationships and community in truly grotesque ways. As with Austen's novels, Belle can be understood as much more subversive than its placid surface suggests. Unlike in Austen, however, Belle does explicitly (rather than implicitly) have a horror story at its heart.

As I watched the movie, I was reminded of the Gothic, for what could be more of a horror story than mass drowning the blacks, and I wondered to what extent eighteenth century Gothic expressed unspoken unease about the black Other. 

I was reminded too of Amazing Grace, the movie about Wilberforce, and of Spielberg's Lincoln. Lincoln and Belle seemed similar in depicting a dramatic moment in black emancipation within the context of a domestic drama, including the influence of blacks in the domestic environment. (If, as both movies posit, it takes a direct relationship with a person from an oppressed class for dominant class people to be influenced to do right thing (a premise I don't necessarily agree with) then let's bring on desegregation.) 

 I found the idealism and emotional intensity of Dido and Davanier compelling. Davanier is a young, poor law student who falls in love with Dido. Davanier is not a Quaker--in fact, he looks like an American minuteman in his blue coats with rows of brass buttons and unpowdered ponytail, but in his simplicity he suggests a Quaker-like alternative to the grander and more lavish upperclass life supported on human misery. His presence speaks to the importance of the simplicity testimony.

Davanier, who cares about people more than money, provides an alternative vision of what life can be.

I take away from this movie the need for an understanding of the context that supports unjust ideologies and the need to fight to change systems that perpetrate cruelty, no matter what the logic (and there always is a seemingly immutable logic) that justifies them. I also support the need for individual action. We need both: saving Dido from slavery was an important act of compassion, though no replacement for abolishing the slave system. Often, I hear that "personal" charity should replace systems of charity or conversely, hear that personal acts have no value; however, the answer is not either/or but both/and.

A question, however, arises. The movie is very Austenian in putting everything on a knife point. While the horrific drowning of the Africans lies at the center of the movie, we never see it enacted--we don't witness the chained slaves thrown overboard. The movie stays in England. The horror is thus both central and yet cerebral. The question becomes: does the movie make its point about the connection between greed/profit and horrific cruelty better by not showing us the image--would we tend to isolate the image from the larger context?--or would showing the image reinforce the movie's point?