In Defense of Earnestness

How long has it been since I wrote a blog post likening dancing and life?  Too long, I think.  So I think I'll just fix that right now.

So I have this friend Spencer who is known throughout our local dance community for his rather...flamboyant dance style.  Words like "infamous" or "melodramatic" might be used to describe it.  And certainly Spencer's dancing does have more drama than anyone else in our scene--involving a lot more sweeping hands and passionate embraces than you'll see anywhere else.  And much as we love Spencer, I don't think that there is anyone that hasn't made at least one good-humored joke about, or attempted over-dramatic parody of, his style, myself included.

But say you're a person like me who gets the occasional song obsession.  You know, where you hear a song and it feels like it had to have been written specifically for you at just this moment in your life.  You listen to it over and over and when you even try to listen to something else it just feels wrong.  Well, maybe you don't know that feeling.  But it's a common enough experience in my life.  And I just happen to be in the midst of another iteration of it right now.  With this song:


In the midst of my obsession comes ULX, and I get to play my current favorite song during one of the dances.  Dancing a favorite song is serious business because you want someone who will do your song justice.  Who do I want to dance with?

The answer is Spencer.

Why would I want to dance with the drama queen of our scene?  Isn't he just going to turn my song into a big joke?

The thing about watching Spencer dance is that that is exactly what you're doing--you're watching him.  You're not dancing with him.  And from that outside perspective it is hard to take him seriously when every dance looks like the same.  There's the hands.......there's cheek to cheek connection......there's sharp turns......yep, it's all there...  It's one thing if you see someone who dances "normally" most of the time dancing like that.  Clearly they're having some serious connection and something intense is happening.  But when every dance is like that?  Well they can't all be serious and intense right?  No one has serious intense passionate dances every time they dance.  So he must just be putting it on...

Now I can't know for sure because I'm not in Spencer's brain.  But if ever there was a person who really was having (or at least trying to have) the intense passionate dance every time he dances, it is Spencer.  Or, to put it another way, he is willing to commit himself 100% to any given dance and to feel it with no fear of looking stupid or...melodramatic.  He is earnestly passionate in his dancing.

And that is why I wanted to dance Favorite Song with him.  Because when I dance with Spencer I get to be earnestly passionate, too.  When you know your partner will match you moment for moment, no matter where you go, it is one of the most liberating things you can experience dancing.  It gives you a level of safety and confidence in your dancing that elevates your movement beyond your actual ability.  It makes it possible to have exactly the dance you wanted to have to your favorite song (and anyone who has ever experienced "expectation vs. reality" disappointment will, if they take a moment to think about it, understand how significant that actually is).

Now, I want you to reread that last paragraph, but replace all the dancing words with relationship words:

And that is why I wanted to date him.  Because when I'm with him I get to be earnestly passionate, too.  When you know your partner will match you moment for moment, no matter where you go, it is one of the most liberating things you can experience in a relationship.  It gives you a level of safety and confidence in the relationship that elevates your emotional vulnerability beyond your actual ability.  It makes it possible to have exactly the relationship you wanted to have with your significant other.

It works pretty well, doesn't it.  Try it with anything at all that involves any sort of relationship with two people and I suspect it will still work equally well.  Because the core of why I love dancing with Spencer doesn't actually have anything to do with his specific dancing.  It's about who Spencer is as a person, which is a person who is earnest without fear of judgement.

 Earnest.

When you hear that word you probably think of the delightful Oscar Wilde play "The Importance of Being Earnest".  You should.  It's a great play (the movie with Colin Firth and Rupert Everett is also great).  But that play is actually a satire about the lack of earnestness (earnesty?) conveyed by people of the time.

Because western society has actually been suffering a drought of earnesty (I'm gonna go ahead and use it cause the OED says it's a word...albeit one that hasn't been used since the 1500's) that has gradually been intensifying since around the turn of the last century.  In the wake of the first and then the second Great War society was faced with a crisis of philosophy, culture, and identity.  Faith came under fire as people wondered how any god they had ever heard of could have let these atrocities happen.  Institutions and authority that had previously been inviolable were questioned.  And the continuing progression of time and events has only reinforced the trend.  Looking at all the "isms," from Modernism to Post-Modernism, including absurdism, existentialism, and nihilism, you can see the decay of western society's moral convictions.  That is not to say that morality was lost; rather the infrastructure of morality was lost.  We didn't stop believing that there was a "right" and a "wrong" (well, sort of...) but we lost our conviction that we understood what they were or who made that decision.  I've said before that World War II is a war that could never happen in today's Western World.  We lack the conviction for it.

But as we lost our conviction and our ability to definitively know things we found a great big gaping hole in our collective world view. And as a society we've come up with plenty of things to fill that hole.  You have the rise of the cult of rationalism--"I believe only in what can be rationally and verifiably proven".  You have the obstinately faithful--"the more archaic you prove my beliefs to be the more desperately I will cling to them".  But most of all I think society has filled the hole with apathy--"It was too hard to decide what was right and what to believe in so instead I simply stopped caring."
*Disclaimer: At this point my brain is seething with counter-arguments, exceptions, tangential points to make, and a million other things...but as this is a blog post, not an academic paper, I'm resolutely going to ignore them all.  I just had to acknowledge that they're there*

Somehow caring about things has become unfashionable.  I can think of no better way to describe this than, somewhat counter-intuitively, to invoke this infamous quote

Nerd culture has become strangely in vogue over the last couple of years as people have, much like the quote above declares, realized that it is a society in which it is still acceptable to care about things.  But I can't help but notice a few things about that.  First...why on earth do we have to be told that it is ok to care about things?  Why do we have to proudly (or not proudly) label ourselves "Nerd" before it is ok to be enthusiastic?  Second, even within the world of nerdly enthusiasm we have adopted a sort of reflexive, self-aware lexicon that allows us to distance ourselves from our enthusiasm.  If you're feeling brave, take a brief trek through the wilds of tumblr, imgur, or reddit fandom communities.  Nerds don't talk about feelings, they talk about their "feels".

You don't get excited, you "squee".

You don't care about a relationship between two characters, you "ship" them.

It's like nerds have to prove that they're aware that they care about these things more than they're necessarily supposed to.  Or like their feelings for their nerd-topic of choice are separate from their real, more reasonable emotions about real life.  And lastly, is the compartmentalizing of enthusiasm to "nerdy" things just another attempt to strip passion, enthusiasm, and conviction from the rest of our lives?  If nerds are the ones who are allowed to be "unironically enthusiastic about stuff", then what about the rest of the world--the ones who don't self-identify as "nerds".  Are they not "allowed" to be passionate?  Or must their enthusiams be cloaked in the ubiquitous coping mechanism of our post-modern world: irony.  Things you can't like openly you can like "ironically".  I can't decide if irony is the bane of modern society or its saving grace...

And now...are you ready for it?  Now I'm going to bring us full circle.  Back to my friend Spencer.  Who dances passionately every single dance.  I described him as being earnest.  Because I think that earnestness is the opposite of apathy.  It is certainly the opposite of irony.  Spencer does not dance ironically, though when we watch him we suspect that he does.  He is earnest.  In his dancing, in his conversation, and in his interactions with life and people.  And though I am a part of this nerdy, ironic, post-modern world of apathy and cynicism, when I dance with Spencer I get to let go of my protective shell of never being too invested in anything and be unabashedly passionate.  Not passionate in a nerdy way, that makes fun of itself as it revels in its feels.  Passionate in a completely authentic and up front way.  A way that we can't help but make fun of when we see it because we can't imagine that such simple, upfront and un-nuanced emotion exists anymore in this world.  That is earnestness.  And even if I make the occasional joke at its expense, and I don't think I'll ever be able to claim that I am a perfectly earnest individual, I have to stand up for earnestness.  Because when I dance earnestly with Spencer I am completely happy.  And I think that has to count for something.

It Aint Fair...

I should 100% be going to sleep right now, but instead I'm writing this post.  Once again I am faced with a topic far too vast to be addressed in a small, insignificant blog, but again I feel impelled to put my thoughts into words for my own sake if for nothing else.

I would not have thought that my young adult fiction class would be the class to provoke most of my "deep thinking" for the semester.  "Deep thinking" is the name I gave just this instant to what I consider to be the very best part of my academic career--the thinking I do beyond, above, around, and through my assignments.  It's when I take ideas and carry them through and really explore them.  Usually it has nothing to do with actual class work or credit.  And I repeat, I did not expect my YA fiction class to be the one to spark it.

But I have been lucky.  My professor has assigned us, thus far at least, some truly superb books.  This week's was Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry.  I read it today.  I think I read it once before years and years ago, but apparently it was one of a very small list of books that I don't remember very well at all.  So today was an essentially fresh and new reading.

Somehow, inhumanity and cruel treatment of others has become a theme in my life the last couple of weeks.  Last week I read the Hitler Youth book, about which I posted.  Then the Holocaust and WWII seemed to keep coming up in various disparate points in my life.  Then there is this book, which fits right in to the theme.  And now, after two weeks of stories about people hating, hurting, and dehumanizing other people, I am starting to chafe and feel raw.

The fact is, when I read these stories about Nazis beating and murdering Jews without remorse, or white men slapping and kicking black children who happened to look at them wrong, the fact is that I am flooded with righteous wrath.  I want to take the fear those poor people experienced and I want to take it right into the hearts of their tormentors.  I want them to know exactly what they put their poor victims through.  I want to cause them the same pain they cause to others because I feel like that is the only way they could ever understand what they'd done.  And it is the only way to make things right and even and square...

Even as I'm writing this I'm brimming with emotion--utter fury that a human being could treat another in such a way, wringing sympathy for those who suffered such vindictive treatment, and embarrassment that I should presume to pity these people as though I can even begin to comprehend their experiences.  I mean, I can read this book, or To Kill A Mockingbird or Hitler's Youth, or any other book, but I can never really fathom what it was like to live in the same world as the actual people.  So who am I to be angry on their behalf or sorry for them?  Who am I to read their stories and then write a blog post as though I have something important to say?

But I must.  Because as I was sitting here on my bed, wondering how things like Slavery and the Holocaust could exist, I suddenly had a bright shining realization that had the gleam of truth about it.

To understand I will take you on somewhat of a tangent.  I'm sure you all remember the movie Taken.  The Liam Neeson movie that came out a year or two ago that everyone just loved.  In it an ex-CIA operative has retired to be closer to his daughter.  She goes on a holiday to Europe and is kidnapped by sex-traders.  Her father then goes on a bloody rampage through Europe to rescue her, killing brutally, mercilessly, and without the slightest remorse anyone who happens to stand too close to him.  Everyone loved this movie because we all loved seeing Liam Neeson circumvent laws that so often seem more a hindrance than a help, and get bloody, efficient results.  I walked out of that movie deeply disturbed as I realized that I had just watched literally hundreds of people die and I had relished it.  I can't tell you how many people responded "yeah, but they were horrible people!  They deserved it!"  Be that as it may, I couldn't help but feel that a movie like Taken played to an unhealthy place in human nature which ought not be cultivated.

Because the fact is, the moment you start rationalizing cruelty by any sort of reasoning, you are on the dangerous slope.  One of the great tragedies of something like the Holocaust or of Slavery is the scarring left in its wake--the mental and emotional backlash.  You take a group of people and categorically demean them to a point where their lives hold no value...what could you possibly expect would happen to those people once they're finally released from your power?  The hatred of the Jews for the Nazis or the blacks for the whites is a horrible thing.  Their lives and their children's lives for generations are warped and mutated by a hatred that is just as blind as the hatred that they experienced.

What I'm trying to say so unsuccessfully is that these terrible points in history often lead to reciprocation.  That righteous anger I feel, that desire to hurt the tormentors as their victims were hurt, those same feelings are felt by others and we try to punish the tyrants somehow.  They need to suffer because they made others suffer!

But what does that make us?  What does that make the victims?  Suddenly the roles are reversed.  And just because you were once a victim doesn't mean that you cannot become a bully.

The epiphany that I had as I was sitting here on my bed was this:

If you cannot possibly find any way to value yourself besides setting yourself up over another person  by stripping them of their humanity...how low...how little must you value yourself?  And how immensely must you loathe yourself?

That was my epiphany.  And along with it came the realization why righteous wrath simply will not work.  Why you cannot punish away that kind of bad behavior.  If you hate yourself that much--that the only thing that can make you feel good is to compare yourself to something you consider less than human--no amount of punishment or pain will fix that.  Indeed, it will but add fuel to the fire.

What can fix that?  The horribly beautiful or beautifully horrible truth is that love is the only thing that can fix that.  Love and forgiveness and acceptance.  If you hate me and I hate you back, that does nothing but create an endless cycle of hate.  But if you hate me and I love you and forgive you back...even if you hate me till the end of time, by removing my own hatred I have managed to decrease the net hatred in the world even just by a little.

My righteous wrath isn't gone.  In fact when I think about forgiving someone in a situation like that a large part of me revolts.  Where is the justice in that?  How can I possibly suggest that such a thing is even possible?  Honestly, it may not be possible for many people.  Maybe their suffering passed the point of no return beyond which they cannot come back without some recompense being paid.  And maybe that's good.  But just try to imaging for a moment a world where everyone loved others--and more importantly, everyone felt well and truly loved.  Imagine a world where everyone knew who he or she was, the value they had, and that they were loved by those around them.

Can you imagine a Holocaust in that world?  Because I cannot.

Forgiveness and love are the way to that world.  Not hatred or vindictive punishment or retribution.

Swing Heil

In the memorandum, Himmler also warned the police about young people who ignored German culture and preferred jazz music and swing dance.  These resisters were called the Swing Youth, due to their taste in music.  According to Himmler, the teenagers said, "Swing Heil," instead of "Heil Hitler."  He noted that the boys wore their hair long and the girls wore makeup and painted their fingernails.

Today I read Susan Campbell Bartoletti's Hitler Youth: Growing Up In Hitler's Shadow.  It was a fascinating read.  I hesitate to try and write a post about it because I don't think I could do justice to the topic without much more time and research, but at the same time I felt an overwhelming wish to voice some of my small thoughts.  Frankly, most of my mind is focused on the war more than the actual book.  That being said, I must briefly mention that, as a person generally uninterested in non-fiction, I was very impressed.  Ms Bartoletti created an incredibly well-crafted book that presented difficult information in a very engaging manner.

Hitler's plan for training the youth of Germany is a fascinating and terrifying thing.  As I read this story of indoctrination and peer pressure I just kept looking at the world in which I live.  The climate of fear and reactionism that allowed Hitler to successively strip Germans of their freedoms with no opposition (indeed, each new breach of their freedom was often celebrated as a victory) seems so like the one in which we live today.  SOPA created an international outcry that roused people from their somnolent apathy and their outrage has, at least for now, been acknowledged.  But where was that same outrage when Congress passed the National Defense Authorization Act which, among I don't even know what else, allows the government to detain Americans "suspected of terrorist activity"?  This law was signed off by the president this month and is now in effect (insofar as I am aware...).  Setting aside the issue of detaining anyone without basic rights because I can only address so much here, the fact is that under a new and frighteningly broad definition of "terrorist activity" our government can now detain us, it's own citizens, indefinitely and without trial.  It may seem reactionary and extreme to imply this comparison, but I can't help but worry...is "The War on Terror" a good enough reason for us to sit quietly while our civil liberties, such an enduring hallmark of this nation (even as its reputation has suffered ever more tarnishing from the hands of outsiders and insiders alike), are chipped away one by one?

Ironically, I found a bitter sort of comfort even as I mused on these frightening ideas.  Bartoletti begins her book with a quote from Hitler himself

I begin with the young.  We older ones are used up...But my magnificent youngsters!  Are there finer ones anywhere in the world?  Look at all these men and boys!  What material!  With them I can make a new world.

Hitler understood the importance of the rising generation in the success of his war machine.  Bartoletti's book describes the activities the Hitler Jungen (HJ) orchestrated to get all the children involved.  She describes hiking and camping and summer camps.  She talks about the patriotic propaganda that played to the fervor of young minds.  Hitler had an immense gift for speaking, and with his nation's youth he used it to terrible effect.  Bartoletti includes several first-hand accounts of boys and girls in their teens who heard him speak.  They talk about how inspiring he was and how his words went right to their souls and captured their hearts and minds.  My bitter comfort as I read these accounts was a knowledge that the youth of my generation are immune to such insidious tactics.  The fact is, mine is a generation defined by apathy.

I cannot be proud of this safeguard. After all, apathy is just as dangerous as misguided fanaticism.  It was the apathy of others that allowed families to be dragged from their homes and put into concentration camps.  With enough apathy, fear, and carefully placed manipulation bad men can create a world all of their own making.  The fact is everyone wants their world to be ok.  They don't want there to be problems and trouble and issues.  It is frightening to think that something is wrong because that means that it must somehow be fixed.  Bartoletti interviewed actual members of the HJ and they talked to her about their inability to face what they had done.  So many of them simply could not accept that the man they had believed in with religious fervor was a madman and a murderer--not even when they saw the evidence with their own eyes.  People don't want to believe that the world is gone awry and that they have been a part of it, no matter how inadvertently.

But most of all this book overwhelmed me with the horror of violence and war.  Hitler took an entire generation and raised them up to be perfect soldiers.  Boys and men capable of the most horrifying atrocities towards their fellow men with little or no immediate remorse.  As I read Bartoletti's accounts of "mercy killings" and then the Holocaust I kept trying to understand how such programs could exist...and keep existing.  It wasn't just the insanity of Hitler; somehow hundreds of other people were pulled into complicity with it.  He was just one man.  Somehow he took living, feeling human beings and turned them into something less, something that was capable of looking others in the eye and inflicting every imaginable kind of torture on them.  How did he do that?

And yet this is not an isolated example.  To our shame, the history of human cruelty is as long as the history of human existence.  The worst part of this is the fact that it continues to exist today.  The fact that after witnessing something so appalling as World War II there still exists places like Guantanamo Bay.  That there are still terrorists and extremists and people filled with hate (or even more terrifying--people filled with militant zeal).  That people are still capable of taking another human being's life in his or her hands and snuffing it out because someone told them to...or because they told themselves to.  How?  How are we still doing this to one another?

I wish I had answers to any of these questions or solutions to even just one of these problems.  How does one abolish apathy while staving off misguided zealotry?  How does one subdue the demon within Man that strips from him his Humanity?  How do people conquer their wills and learn to interact with each other civilly and reasonably?  I don't know.  All I know is that even without solutions we have to keep trying.  Bartoletti told the story of various young men and women who rose up in rebellion under Hitler's regime.  In every instance they were quickly found and executed, their voices silenced, leaving what appeared to be little or no change in their wake.  It was difficult to hear their stories without bitterness as I wondered what it was for.  But I had to remind myself that the simple fact that I could read their stories all these years later means that they had some effect.  I cannot find the words to explain what their sacrifice means to me, a privileged and ignorant girl some 70 years later.  All I can say is that I am so grateful that they made it.  And perhaps, with that example to inspire me, if one day I find myself called on to sacrifice something of my own to protest against injustice, hatred, violence, or cruelty I will be able to make the right decision.  Even if I don't think it will make a difference.

An excerpt

An excerpt from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

"The underlying problems are the same.  In each case there's a beautiful way of doing it and an ugly way of doing it, and in arriving at the high-quality, beautiful way of doing it, both an ability to see what "looks good" and an ability to understand the underlying methods to arrive at that "good" are needed...
The nature of our culture is such that if you were to look for instruction in how to do any of these jobs, the instruction would always give only one understanding of Quality, the classic....with the presumption that once these underlying methods were applied, "good" would naturally follow.  The ability to see directly what "looks good" would be ignored.
The result is rather typical of modern technology, an over-all dullness of appearance so depressing that it must be over-laid with a veneer of "style" to make it acceptable.  And that, to anyone who is sensitive to romantic Quality, just makes it all the worse.  Now it's not just depressingly dull, it's also phony.  Put the two together  and you get a pretty accurate basic description of modern American technology:  stylized cars and stylized outboard motors and stylized typewriters and stylized clothes.  Stylized refrigerators filled with stylized food in stylized kitchens in stylized houses.  Plastic stylized toys for stylized children, who at Christmas and birthdays are in style with their stylish parents...Its the style that gets you; technological ugliness syruped over with romantic phoniness in an effort to produce beauty and profit by people who, though stylish, don't know where to start because no one has ever told them there's such a thing as Quality in this world and it's real, not style.  Quality isn't something you lay on top of sbjects and objects like tinsel on a Christmas tree.  Real Quality must be the source of the subjects and objects, the cone from which the tree must start."