EthicalDative

Masha Gessen’s article is unusually affecting for me at a time when I feel enervated by tinyness in my own country. The article is a sensible and sensitive appreciation of conduct that betokens great — I would say towering — stature on the part of New Zealand’s leader. I’m having trouble not quoting more passages from it, but as usual I try to focus here on language and its power — “all that makes us us.”

Addressing the families of the victims, [Jacinda Ardern] said, “We cannot know your grief, but we can walk with you at every stage. We can and we will surround you with aroha, manaakitanga, and all that makes us us.” She used Maori words that mean kindness, compassion, generosity… It was the absence that was notable in Ardern’s speech: the absence of a rhetorical pivot from “us” to “them,” the enemy.

(Masha Gessen, “Jacinda Ardern Has Rewritten the Script for How a Nation Grieves After a Terrorist Attack,” The New Yorker, 3-22-19)

(c) 2019 JMN.

“The bright side has been denied the attention it deserves,” writes Nicholas Christakis. Credit Demetrius Freeman for The New York Times.

How a target of students’ ire came to write a book about humanity’s transcendent goodness.

To accept this belief that human beings are evil or violent or selfish or overly tribal is a kind of moral and intellectual laziness,” [Nicholas Christakis] told me. It also excuses that destructiveness. “The way to repair our torn social fabric is to say: Wait a minute, that’s not quite right.”

He mentioned theodicy, which endeavors to vindicate God’s existence despite so much suffering. “Blueprint [Christakis’s new book],” he said, is sociodicy: It tries “to vindicate society despites its failures.”

(Frank Bruni, “A ‘Disgusting’ Yale Professor Moves On,” NYTimes, 3-19-19)

(“After the din died down,” Yale awarded Christakis the Sterling Professorship, the school’s highest faculty honor.)

(c) 2019 JMN.

Sasha Arutyunova for The New York Times.

Carol Gilligan is the author of “In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development,” published in 1982. The widely disseminated book “made her an academic celebrity.” She and Naomi Snider have recently co-authored “Why Does Patriarchy Persist?” The quotations are from an article about a talk Gilligan and Snider gave at the Strand bookstore in New York City on January 31, 2019.

While other academics and conservative thinkers were tying themselves in knots over Dr. Gilligan’s work, Harvard anointed her as its first gender studies professor. “When I got there,” she said, “I thought gender was something you did in Latin.”
…
At the Strand event, the last question of the evening came from a teenage girl. What advice would Dr. Gilligan give to young girls who want to resist or protest, she said, “but don’t want to be labeled ‘nasty or angry women?’”
“Well, you are going to be labeled,” was Dr. Gilligan’s answer. “The question is, ‘What is your response?’”

(Penelope Green, “Carefully Smash the Patriarchy,” NYTimes, 3-18-19)

(c) 2019 JMN.