Act Your Age, Not Your Shoe Size

A friend passed along this meme yesterday.  At first glance I liked it, but then another part of me reared up and said No.

Right off the bat: In the words of the American humorist Josh Billings, "It ain't ignorance causes so much trouble; it's folks knowing so much that ain't so."  In my words, everyone is born naked, incontinent, and ignorant, but these conditions can be changed.  Ignorance may be the least changeable, however, because no matter how much we learn, there will be more we still don't know.

Further, ignorance is meaningless except in relation to some piece of knowledge: No one is globally ignorant, just as everybody is ignorant about a great deal.  I am ignorant, for example, of the number of hairs on my head, ignorant of ancient Akkadian, ignorant of your birthday.  One commenter on the post declared that "ignorant" means "ignoring information" not "just not knowing"; another correctly explained that that is not what what the word means, so the first commenter was showing his own ignorance.)  It's similar in this respect to "agnostic": no one is or should be agnostic (not-knowing) about everything, but we should be agnostic about what we don't know.

I'm aware that many people use the word "ignorant" to mean other things, as I believe Angelou was doing in this quotation.  One of Merriam-Webster's examples of usage is "He is an ignorant old racist," which I think reflects the other connotations of the word, which carry a strong sense of moral disapproval.  (Chances are that old racist knows a lot that ain't so.)  Among Webster's related words are lowbrow, philistine, uncultivated; but these all refer to someone who is not a blank slate but socialized along the (supposedly) wrong lines.  A bumpkin is not necessarily uncultivated, but is well socialized in (supposedly) less sophisticated folkways than he or she ought.  Other related words include idiotic, imbecile, moronic, stupid, and witless, which fit with the confused attitudes many (most?) people have toward the mentally deficient: they are not just incapable of learning, they perversely refuse to learn, just to drive me crazy.  This shows up in the popular use of the word retarded, which is used as a moral accusation, although the truly mentally retarded are usually congenitally incapable of further growth.  Don't forget that the other words in that list -- idiot, imbecile, moron -- entered English as clinical, hopefully neutral words for mental incapacity, but quickly became insults.  Ignorant has the same trajectory: its strict denotation is morally neutral, but it rarely is used strictly.

Numerous commenters on the original Facebook post fell back on another trope, that of the eddicated pointy-head who has a lot of book-learning but no common sense.  Angelou clearly had this idea in mind herself.  Aside from the obvious limitations of relying on common sense, let me unpack her second sentence for a while.  "Educated" is a troublesome word there.  Yes, many highly intelligent people lacked or were denied access to schooling, and many educated themselves.  I wonder if Angelou was thinking of such self-taught people, or if she meant that they had wisdom based on experience, etc.  I don't mean to downgrade the wisdom an unschooled and/or illiterate person can accumulate, which can be considerable and deserves respect, but since most people conflate education with formal schooling, it's hard to sort the different possibilities here.  I think everyone should be treated with consideration and a degree of respect, though past a certain point respect for one's opinions and beliefs must be earned -- not by acquiring or developing them in school, but by giving reasons why they are valid.

Angelou's remarks are interesting because of her reported insistence on being called "Doctor," based on the honorary degrees she had received.  There's a bit of a contradiction going on there, I think.  I don't doubt Angelou's dedicated hard work at writing and speaking -- mastering the English language, in brief -- and thinking, and I respect her writings without regard to her lack of advanced formal schooling.  (I could point out that numerous distinguished white male writers have not attended college either, and chose to educate themselves.)   But since I wouldn't give unquestioning assent to the pronouncements of someone with an earned doctorate -- Henry Kissinger, to name an easy example -- I wouldn't give unquestioning assent to the pronouncements of someone with an honorary doctorate.

Granted, as some of her defenders pointed out, she demanded respect for her achievements in the face of widespread disrespect for the work of women and especially women of color.  But it's all the more meaningful to call for respect of people without degrees on their own merit, rather than appealing to honorary degrees or titles.  I certainly wouldn't fail to call a black female M.D. "Doctor" or a black female Ph.D. "Professor" if that was her title in a university.  But I wouldn't call a white male computer programmer "Doctor" based on a doctorate in computer science, let alone an honorary degree in something else.

It's perhaps easy for me to say this, given that I am not a black woman who grew up in Jim Crow America, and haven't faced the normative disrespect someone like Angelou fought against.  But if I take the quotation above seriously, she doesn't need to have a doctorate for me to respect her.  Insisting on being called "Doctor" undercuts her own declaration that people without degrees or titles also deserve respect and consideration.  (Indeed, the very title "Doctor" gets its prestige by virtue of its academic associations.)  And throwing around the word "ignorance" in this way earns the thrower a certain judicious disrespect.

It was probably easy too for the dead white male Isaac Newton to say, as he's reported to have said:

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

In my experience, smart people are acutely aware of the limits of their knowledge and the corresponding extent of their ignorance.  It appears to me that it's others, those who want to put them on a pedestal, who are uncomfortable about the idea that even the smartest, wisest people are ignorant and know it.  (That's apart from the tactical anti-intellectualism associated with some forms of religion, which mocks worldly knowledge in favor of submission to authority.)  Maybe this has something to do with the painful discovery most of us make, that our parents don't know everything and aren't infallible, which may lead to a search for someone who does know everything and is infallible.  Either someone knows everything and is perfect, or knows nothing and is a loser.  I take, not a middle path but a third one: we have some knowledge, but it's always incomplete, imperfect, and subject to correction.  The illiterate are not necessarily stupid; the literate are not necessarily smart.  But the illiterate are ignorant (of reading and writing).  Using ignorant as an insult does the ignorant no good, and doesn't indicate a lot of wisdom in the person who does the insulting.

Somebody Up There

I'm pretty sure I was no more than seven years old when, after having wakened from a nightmare and gone to my mother for comfort and reassurance, I began to wonder who she went to when she had a bad dream, when she was afraid.  I had just come to realize that my mother was also a daughter, that one of my grandmas was her mother.  But she didn't live with her.  If she had a bad dream, she couldn't get up and run to her mother.  So what did she do?  What did all grownups do?

Democracy Now! broadcast excerpts today from a memorial to the late Maya Angelou, and what they chose to share was mostly gag-making.  First the war criminal and general congenital cheap pig Bill Clinton:

Here is why I think she died when she did. It was her voice. She was without a voice for five years, and then she developed the greatest voice on the planet. God loaned her his voice. She had the voice of God. And he decided he wanted it back for a while.

That got him an ovation.  Of course she really died because God needed another angel.  And this sort of thing, with its amoral sentimentality, is probably inescapable when someone dies, but coming from someone like Bill Clinton it's especially repulsive.

Next up was Michelle Obama, who claimed that "the power of Maya Angelou’s words ... carried a little black girl from the south side of Chicago all the way to the White House."  Well, no, I don't think Angelou should get the credit (or the blame) for Mrs. Obama's ending up married to a President of the United States.  Not even when I consider that Angelou also inspired "a young white woman from Kansas who named her daughter after Maya and raised her son to be the first black president of the United States."  (I'm sure I'm not the only person who reflects from time to time on what difference it would make to the discourse about President Obama if his mother were still alive.  Did she really "raise her son to be the first black president of the United States," or were her standards higher than that?)

Finally Oprah Winfrey took her turn, and she was in many ways the most appalling.

I was in utter despair and distraught and had called Maya. I remember being locked in the bathroom with the door closed, sitting on the toilet seat. I was crying so hard she could barely understand what I was saying. And I had — I was upset about something that I can’t even remember now what it was. Isn’t that how life works? And I called for long-distance cry on her shoulder, but she wasn’t having it. She said, as you all know she could, stop it! Stop it now. And I’d say, what? What? What did you say? And she said, stop your crying now. And I continued to sniffle and she said, did you hear me? And I said, yes, ma’am. Only she could level me to my seven year old self in an instant.

And so on, and on.  Winfrey's remarks sent me to the pages of Marge Piercy's 1973 novel Small Changes.  Piercy had a fair amount to say about the Strong Woman and the women who depend on her.  In Small Changes there's a Socratic dialogue on the subject.

“Don’t try to make me somebody up there,” Wanda said with quiet anger.  “On some higher level.  I’m older than you, yes.  I have a few things to teach you that you want to learn, though most of it is in you already.  But I’m not existing on some easier, calmer level.  If I’m older, I’m also more spent.  I have less reserves, less to spare.  I’m a woman the same as you, and it isn’t easier for me to fight and to survive and to get things done than it is for you!  It makes me angry when you pretend it’s different for me.”

“But you know so much more.  You never wonder who you are, I know you don’t!”

“Beth, it’s recently I stopped being only Joe’s woman and mother of my kids.  That’s all I was for years, and don’t forget it.  Joe, my kids, and radical politics were my life, in that order.  I wasn’t on my own list of priorities.”

“But now you do know!  You do!  I feel you’re pretending.  Because I know you’re stronger than me.”

“You mean I’m louder.  How do you know I’m stronger, Beth?  Because you haven’t seen me break yet?” [454]

And:

She wanted to love, yes, but safely, without demands, from a distance.  She wanted Wanda for her own loud, strong, vigorous dark Madonna.  Part of her froze and tucked in when Wanda wanted to make demands back, when Wanda wanted to talk about her aching legs or to worry about her sons or to be sullenly angry and defeated: when Wanda asked her to be her friend [456-7].

I haven't read that much of Angelou's work, but from what I have read I get the impression that she made her own weaknesses and fears clear enough.  She must have gotten so tired of people attaching themselves to her, demanding to be mothered and inspired.  It's no tribute to her to turn her into a wise, powerful oracle who was always on top of things, a "loud, strong, vigorous dark Madonna" who'd make you whole if you but touched the hem of her garment.  Michelle Obama did better than Winfrey in this regard, recognizing that Angelou was honored better by learning from her weaknesses as well as her strengths.  I wonder who was there for the adult Maya Angelou when she had bad dreams.