#476 Musings Beyond the Bunker (Friday October 7)
Good morning,
FIRST LINES FROM BOOKS
Thanks to everyone who identified the first lines of great books. Albert Delgado and Bill Johnson were the winners, with seven correct answers each.
INVISIBLE MAN—THE BEGINNING
Among the first lines of great books from last week was the first line of Invisible Man. In the first paragraph from this 1952 National Book Award winner, Ellison describes the alienation and “other-ness” experienced by a Black man of the era. It is worthy of visiting again:
“I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids - and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination - indeed, everything and anything except me.”
CONFIRMATION BIAS AND NOT HEARING OR SEEING OTHERS
In thinking about Ellison’s breakthrough novel, it got me thinking about how “invisible” we can be to people unlike us or who don’t have the same lived experience as we have had. Meanwhile, Albert Delgado wrote this, encapsulating much of my thinking in these 2 ½ years of Musings:
“…Confirmation bias results in people usually seeing what they want to see and not seeing what they do not want to see, which is all driven by what they have already seen (and refused to see) before and the opinions created before the then current experience. No person nor political perspective has a monopoly on truth.”
This is so true. We increasingly live in a world where people are trapped in their narrow silo of personal experience, world view, political belief, and economic interest. People surround themselves in a bubble of confirmation bias. They only read certain periodicals. They only watch a single perspective on the news, which relentlessly floods them with a single perspective (often at high volume!), without weighing or even considering competing opinions. They associate only with those with whom they share views. This extends to the unwillingness to be confronted with other ideas or even countenance the discussion of different points of view in schools and institutions of higher learning.
People on the right want to ban books that are religiously unacceptable or which describe and give human face to lifestyles not their own. People on the left won’t allow books that contain objectionable words or phrases or were written by people who lived in earlier, less enlightened, times. These same people often think that those with opposing views shouldn’t be invited to speak or share their views and, indeed, should be shouted down when they attempt to share their views in an open forum.
Most recently nine student groups at the Berkeley School of Law (nee Boalt Hall) passed resolutions prohibiting people supporting Israel or that they label as Zionist in their point of view from speaking to, attending, or joining their groups. Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, points out that this standard disqualifies him from speaking with these student groups at his school. Here we are at one of the great universities of the world with a standard within their organizations that, under the guise of moral responsibility, instead makes them perpetrators of antisemitism and the denial of civil rights and speech of others.
Worth noting, in addition to the travesty of the standard established by these nine organizations, is that there are many other student organizations at Berkeley that haven’t adopted this standard. In the meantime, this anti-Jewish agenda has been called out by Dean Chemerinsky, who said the bylaws of these groups put Jewish students “in a position all too familiar: deny or denigrate a part of their identity or be excluded from community groups.”
HUBRIS AND HUMILITY
Several readers have shared that, even when the person with an opinion might be despicable on some level, occasionally, that person might be right. It is incumbent upon us to examine the idea without disposing of it simply because of the speaker. And in a remarkable admission of his (and our) own hubris, Albert Delgado notes, “The world is short on humility, introspection and self-criticism, starting with me.”
In light of today’s meanderings, this bit of wisdom seems apt:
"It is unwise to be too sure of one's own wisdom. It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err."--Mahatma Gandhi
MEANWHILE THE FIRST LINES REVEALED
Here are the answers to the quiz from earlier this week:
Call me Ishmael. Moby Dick, by Herman Melville
As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell
We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, by Hunter S. Thompson
Mother died today. Or maybe, yesterday; I can't be sure. The Stranger, by Albert Camus
The story so far: in the beginning, the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams
I am an invisible man. Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison
Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy. This story is about something that happened to them when they were sent away from London during the war because of the air-raids. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, by C.S. Lewis (the first in the Narnia series)
More first lines coming next week!
Have a great day,
Glenn
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