One of my best friends died recently.

It still doesn’t feel real. The last time I saw her was the day after the Fourth of July. Her smile always lit up the room, but that night, the joy seemed to seep out of her, so much so that even the person who took our order at dinner commented on it.

Life was coming together. She’d gone back to school to become a speech-language pathology assistant and was on track to complete her program in the fall. Unfailingly patient, positive, and compassionate, her teachers said she had everything it took to excel in the field. She’d just become an aunt for the first time, too, and made the four-hour drive from Ventura to San Diego whenever she could to get to know this three-month-old with a gummy smile and a pompadour, who was now a part of her. And she’d recently fallen in love, with a guy from Missouri, whose Hinge profile she’d shown me last Thanksgiving. They were talking about moving in together after she graduated. Our high school friend group had yet to meet him, but she promised we would soon.

We never got the chance before she left us. It was a prolonged sinus infection that progressed into fatal meningitis. A “perfect storm” of events, a nurse later said. Everything went so wrong so fast that she was still wearing the magnetic eyelashes she’d put on to see the Barbie movie when she was brought to the hospital.

Perhaps inescapably, because we met in the 2000s, when social media was just taking off and phones had become cameras (and vice versa), the grief has taken on a digital dimension. To stop myself from being consumed by the questions around her death, the hows and whys of what happened, I’ve been trying to focus on remembering her life through these memories preserved in pixelated resin.

There is an overwhelming number of them to choose from, but I can’t help but feel what is missing. The Facebook replies I can no longer access because I deleted my account. The texts and videos I never backed up on the cloud. Obsolete media whose formats are no longer supported today. Underlying this sense of absence, of course, is the knowledge that as much as there is, there won’t be more coming.

Much of the digital ephemera I’ve come across so far I remember, even if the memories of what we were doing or where we were when we made them are just glimmers. But going through our old texts the other day, I found a few unopened voice messages I must have forgotten to play. Because I’d waded through so much of the annals of our lives at that point, I thought I was prepared for anything. But I haven’t been able to bring myself to listen to those recordings yet.

I think it’s because the medium feels like it picks up a conversation in real time. It’s the message in the bottle of the digital age. You share a thought without knowing when, where, or in what time zone it will find its recipient. In that way, voice messages feel alive in a way that video or a photo—where a haircut, a t-shirt, or a setting betrays its time stamp—does not.

Voice messages are relatively new. WeChat, the Chinese instant message and social media app, introduced them in 2011, and they have been available on Apple’s iMessage since June 2014. Over the past decade, the technology, which allows you to send voice recordings over messenger apps, has rapidly gained popularity. According to a recent YouGov poll for Vox, 62% of Americans say they’ve sent a voice message (or voice memo or voice note), and around 30% communicate this way “weekly, daily, or multiple times a day.”

But the basic idea behind the technology has arguably been with us since the mid-1800s when Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville invented the phonautograph, the first machine to document sound. This soon gave way to Thomas Edison’s phonograph, which allowed people to record and playback sound on cylinders, opening up the commercial possibilities of the audio medium.

It doesn’t surprise me that once people could get their hands on the phonograph, they instantly saw its potential for preserving the voices of loved ones beyond the grave.

“The phonograph was linked with death from the very beginning,” according to Jonathan Scott’s Into the Groove: The Story of Sound From Tin Foil to Vinyl, which notes that the “idea of the preservation of a voice after death was a common trope in the phonograph’s advertising copy.” Most famously, the iconic trademark and logo of Victor Talking Machine Company, later RCA Victor, seemingly depicts a dog listening to a recording of his late owner.

Nipper, the dog gazing at the brass horn of a phonograph in English artist Francis Barraud’s painting “His Master’s Voice,” was the real-life companion of the artist’s recently departed brother, Mark Henry. While it’s been debunked that Nipper was actually listening to Mark’s recorded voice in Francis’ original rendering, recording the “last words” of dying individuals was a real trend, as detailed in newspaper accounts, like this 1889 piece in the San Francisco Examiner about a family who took a phonograph to the hospital to “cheer their mother on during her long illness and also to preserve the tones of her voice to comfort them after her death.”

It makes sense that Victorians embraced a technology for preserving the voices of the departed. The culture was steeped in death due to high mortality rates, and from funerals to fashion, Victorians came up with a dizzying number of ways to commemorate those who had passed (what historian James Steven Curl has characterized as a “celebration of death”).

Rapid scientific advancement during the era, which comingled with a burgeoning spiritualist movement, seemingly made the Great Beyond more tangible to mourners. The invention of X-ray machines made the invisible visible. Modern camera techniques like double exposure allowed for “spirit photographs,” which hinted at a world beyond this one. The phonograph presented just another way to thin the veil between the living and the dead, to help those grieving find new ways to connect with those who were gone.

Historian of sound John M. Picker has also made the case that because the phonograph was the first technology that let people record sound at home, its embrace by Victorians was “inherently more personal and interactive” than consumer responses to audio technology that followed (such as the gramophone, which allowed playback only).

We’ve come a long way from that initial liberation of the voice from the constraints of time and space. But holding my iPhone in 2023, the distance to these earliest phonographic recordings feels closer.

Like the Victorians, and many, many people since, I share that same human want that drove us to record sound from the beginning: to hold on to those we’ve loved and lost and miss.

The post Her Voice Memos and My Grief appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

We met through a mutual friend who told us both, “You’ll love her. You get angry about all the same things.”

That was almost exactly correct. At the time, Joanne had just started a nonprofit to provide free diapers to families in need. Colleen was a freelance writer who had walked away from a newspaper job to work in a soup kitchen after her editor told her to stop writing so much about poverty.

We found sisterhood raging about injustice over coffee, and devising strategies for change.

Twenty years of collaboration and friendship followed. We’ve worked together, written a book together, talked each other through family crises. But we disagree on one fundamental issue. We are on opposite sides of the abortion debate that splits the country, sides that have become more fixed and hostile with the recent overturn of Roe v. Wade. Yet we never argue about abortion because that would be pointless; our positions are formed by deeply held values. We have discussed abortion more since the overturn of Roe than we did in all the years of our friendship that preceded it. These are uncomfortable though not acrimonious talks, with more silent pauses than usual. Still, through these hard conversations defined by respect and humility—largely absent from the public discourse—we have not let the two “camps” define our stances, or our friendship.

Joanne grew up in a justice-oriented, Reform Jewish household where her faith and her family supported the right to abortion. Her mother ran a reproductive health clinic that offered the full range of care including abortion services. Her father was an attorney active in the American Civil Liberties Union. Joanne became a social worker, gravitating toward supporting parents and children.

Her belief in abortion rights never wavered. Joanne believes all women should have the same options when an unplanned pregnancy occurs. Restrictions on abortion disproportionately prevent women and girls with low income from obtaining them. She also recognizes that real “choice” needs to include resources that put all children on path for success.

Colleen’s parents, neither of whom had a high school diploma, had three children in the early years of their marriage and then avoided having another for 11 years. Money was tight. Colleen’s father’s alcoholism was already causing his mental and physical decline. Nevertheless, Colleen appeared.

Observant Catholics, Colleen’s parents believed that life began at conception and that, even in their circumstances, a baby was something to celebrate. Her father was a Conservative, who railed against “welfare queens” and the “goddamned liberals” at every Sunday dinner. One day, young Colleen protested, “You shouldn’t talk like that, Daddy. It’s clear from the Gospels that Jesus was a liberal.” She aspired to spend her life as Jesus did: sticking up for people nobody wanted, particularly people in poverty.

Though she recoiled from her father’s conservativism, the Left’s reasoning on abortion was unpersuasive to Colleen. No one can prove when life begins. For Colleen, abortion risks killing a human being; and Jesus’ favorite kind of human being at that—an unwanted one.

Our partnership would not work if Colleen behaved like the most aggressive abortion opponents—or if Joanne lumped her in with that crowd. Colleen does not harass women walking into clinics. She gets as angry as Joanne at “pro-lifers” who support the death penalty. Joanne donates to advocacy groups that fight for legal abortion. Colleen does no legislative advocacy around abortion and instead works toward life-affirming policies like eradicating poverty and providing free health care. Joanne favors the same policies, not because they would affect the demand for abortion but because everyone has a right to thrive—this is something we agree on absolutely.

Neither of us remembers when Colleen came out to Joanne as pro-life, probably because it was not dramatic. To posit the possibility and protection of life before birth in progressive company is usually uncomfortable. Colleen has left groups supporting immigrant justice, socialism, and voting rights when those entities expanded focus to make statements or take actions supporting abortion rights. Comrades have yelled at her about coat hangers and accused her of not caring about women and girls who are raped. Much like the bloody fetus signs anti-abortion activists wave outside clinics, these are unfair accusations that people on the other side lack compassion. Neither of us believes the other is less of a person because we disagree about abortion.

We tend to support different candidates in presidential primaries: Colleen donated to Bernie Sanders; Joanne to Elizabeth Warren. In general elections, we both have always gotten behind the Democrat, because Democratic policies help more people thrive, especially those living in poverty, than the alternative. But we also believe that some politicians on both sides of this debate are getting a free ride. You are pro-life if you oppose abortion—with no obligation to support paid family leave, quality affordable childcare, or the many other reforms families desperately need to live and thrive. You are pro-choice if you support abortion access—regardless of whether you have done anything to work toward wage parity or push back against the closure of maternity care hospitals, which is exacerbating the already horrendous Black maternal mortality rate.

Decisions about having children do not exist in a vacuum but are influenced by a thousand cultural and economic realities. Being truly pro-life or pro-choice requires us to knock down rhetorical barriers and focus on the areas where we wholeheartedly agree: that every child has a right to be placed on a path to success and that no mother should have to sacrifice her own success to make that happen.

We are both horrified by the recklessness of the post-Roe rush to legislate. Some people are finding it impossible to get methotrexate—one of the drugs that saved Colleen’s life (twice) during cancer treatments—because it is used in some abortions. The idea that a lawmaker in the U.S. wrote legislation in 2020 suggesting a physician should “attempt to reimplant an ectopic pregnancy into the woman’s uterus”—which is medically impossible—is at best ignorant, and more likely a blatantly cavalier approach to women’s lives and health.

Laws touching on reproductive health should be written by reputable medical experts—just as legislators turn to legitimate experts in fields ranging from coastal erosion to air traffic control to draft other kinds of bills requiring specialized knowledge. We agree that progressives who are also anti-abortion have a particular obligation to speak up about the ignorance that drives so much of the movement, and harms women.

Abortion is important, and worth fighting over. But making abortion a litmus test issue is helping to steer the country in the wrong direction: one where defining what camp you are in is more important than actually creating a society where more people can thrive.

And so we go about our business working for, almost always, the same thing—the needs of oppressed people who have already been born. This is more productive than an endless argument. But it’s also harder. It requires each of us to acknowledge that people are complicated and that good people can hold beliefs we find absolutely unacceptable. It requires genuine love and humility.

We both came of age after Roe, and we both have friends who’ve had abortions. Shortly after graduate school, when Joanne was a new mother, a friend of hers contemplated abortion, largely for financial reasons. Joanne offered her a home and resources to make raising a child possible—if that was what her friend wanted. About this same time, one of Colleen’s closest friends had an unplanned pregnancy. Colleen volunteered to drop out of college and support the baby so that her friend could get a degree on schedule.

Both young women chose abortion. From extremely different perspectives, we behaved similarly: We offered a helping hand and unwavering love, regardless of our friends’ decisions. We believe that says everything about choosing friends and allies—and envisioning the kind of society we want for ourselves, and future generations.

The post Can Two Friends Agree to Disagree on Abortion in Post-Roe America? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The discourse isn’t necessarily anchored to the fourth Thursday in November, and the people texting share neither DNA (nor deep-rooted emotional baggage). Rather, such pressing questions revolve around an unofficial holiday nominally in the Thanksgiving orbit that’s slowly formed its own customs and significance over the last decade or so to become a standalone celebration in its own right. The result, Friendsgiving, has become one of my favorite events on the calendar year.

Sometimes traced to November 1994, when the TV show Friends aired its first Thanksgiving episode, the concept was floating around for some time before the word “Friendsgiving” appeared in print circa 2007. The fledgling tradition received a boost four years later after Baileys Irish Cream used it in an ad campaign, and each November since, it has grown more popular, breaking through the American lexicon by the mid 2010s. (Merriam-Webster officially added the term to the dictionary in January 2020.)

But what if instead of thinking about Friendsgiving as a recent phenomenon, we considered it a welcome return to a time when our culture centered around friendship?

In classical philosophy, friendship was considered to be the summum bonum, or highest good.

That’s because the ancient Greeks and Romans viewed the relationship as a glue that held civic life together, uniting private and public spheres. As Aristotle once wrote: “Friendship or love is the bond which holds states together, and that legislators set more store by it than by justice; for concord is apparently akin to friendship and it is concord that they especially seek to promote.”

America’s founders also understood friendship in this light.

“Inspired by the ‘Aristotelian concept of friendship as collective tissue,’ early Americans understood male friendships ‘as crucial to the nation-building project and its creation of worthy republican citizens […] encouraging empathy between citizens in a society that no longer cohered through shared loyalty to a monarch,’” as American literary scholar Michael Kalisch argues in The Politics of Male Friendship in Contemporary American Fiction.

Indeed, Kalisch contends that while the republic’s separation from Britain is often framed as a refusal of paternal authority, male friendship offered an “alternative metaphor of civic association in the nascent independent nation,” one that united it with France’s cry across the ocean for liberté, égalité, fraternité. Both revolutions, Kalisch posits, were “galvanized by the egalitarian promise of friendship”—even though, as he points out, such a promise only extended to white men.

But if ideas of friendship and love were long seen as interchangeable, friendship’s decline in the American civic space coincided with the separation of these spheres. In Perfecting Friendship, Dartmouth gender and literary scholar Ivy Schweitzer observes that by the late 1800s “the distinctions between friends and family, love and friendship gradually became clearer” and that, in turn, “friendship as the privileged site of sympathetic attachment became increasingly feminized, privatized, and removed from the public sphere of republican and democratic politics.”

In the 20th century, friendship remained on society’s periphery, Schweitzer continues, as “Western culture developed an obsession with individual selfhood and sexual desire.” So dramatic was the drop-off, she notes, that by the 1990s the American literary critic Wayne C. Booth confessed, while reading about Aristotelian friendship, “to be puzzled by the modern neglect of what had been ‘one of the major philosophical topics, the subject of thousands of books and tens of thousands of essays.’”

But the understanding of friendship as a civic model wasn’t abandoned wholesale during this period: Marginalized communities, in particular, continued to advance older notions of friendship, recognizing the ways in which it provided a powerful alternative mode of intentional community and organizing. In Feminism for the Americas, UCLA historian Katherine M. Marino shows how friendship was embraced as a model of social democracy during the rise of a global movement for women’s rights. Leaders like Panamanian feminist Clara González, Marino writes, understood that friendship corresponded “to the real needs of modern life, which is essentially a life of relationships, of interdependence, of solidarity, of mutual aid, of social action and of love.” The concept of the “chosen family,” first articulated in 1991 by anthropologist Kath Weston in Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship, illuminated the ways that queer and transgender individuals, too, had pushed the notion of friendship to encompass deep, deliberate bonds that existed outside of legal or genetic ties.

The rise of Friendsgiving from an ad hoc replacement for being far away from home on the holidays into a ritual all its own suggests we’re seeing a larger, mainstream push to celebrate and honor these non-familial social relationships. And I hope its popularity is an indication of broader willingness to reconsider the role that friendship can play in our society.

So, if you’re participating in a Friendsgiving of your own this year, consider if you’re advancing a model of friendship that the ancients might recognize. And maybe save a toast for Cicero and his treatise How to Be a Friend or Laelius de Amicitia, and cheers to the benevolentia (mutual kindness), consensio (consensus), caritas (devotion), and fidelitas (loyalty) that you’re cultivating together.

The post Friendsgiving Puts Friendship Back Where It Belongs appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

When I was a child, my grandmother often expressed the importance of communicating with everyone. She backed that up with her own behavior. When she walked down the street, she spoke to everyone. It did not matter if you were elderly or a child, or if you spoke English or Spanish. She had a smile and a conversation for you.

My grandmother knew people mattered, so she invested her time and energy in people. However, as she aged, she observed that her approach was becoming rare. She talked about how, in the age of technology, most people believe they do not have time for communications longer than a 160-character text message—much less time to develop genuine friendships that last for decades. In fact, people were barely speaking to one another.

As much as I hated to admit it, I had noticed it too.

My grandmother’s wisdom opened my mind to having a pen pal. This hobby—exchanging regular letters with someone on the other side of the world that you may never meet in person—used to be popular in the 20th century. But many people consider the practice outdated in the digital age of Facebook and Zoom. Today, when I reveal that among my longtime friendships is a relationship with a pen pal, with whom I communicate solely through long emails, people find it odd.

It isn’t odd—it’s wonderful. My relationship with my pen pal is one of the most valuable friendships I have ever had, even though I have never met her in person, or even heard her voice.

It all started in 2013. I was on my way to USC to meet with Kerstin Zilm, a German radio personality who wanted to interview me about being a struggling student at Long Beach City College. I did not know much about German culture or the German audience who would listen to the show, but I agreed to do the interview for two reasons. The first was that Kerstin was a journalist who I trusted—she had mentored me when I was part of a program called Reporter Corps. Second, I had internalized my grandmother’s advice. I felt that telling my story to whomever was interested was better than keeping it to myself. You never know who could learn from, or be intrigued by, my life experiences.

After the story aired, a woman named Renate reached out to Kerstin, inquiring how she could find me and help me financially with college. I thought it was great that Renate, who resides in Germany, wanted to assist with my education. My pride did not allow me to accept money—I was looking for a job to make ends meet—but I didn’t let the opening drop. Encouraged by Kerstin, I emailed Renate back thanking her for inquiring about my status in school. This would be the beginning of a beautiful transcontinental friendship.

At first, Renate and I emailed each other twice a month. She wanted to know a lot more about my life growing up in Watts, my attempts to further my education, and whether there were ways beyond finances that she could help. I did not have a specific answer for her last question, but her moral support was important. Just having someone rooting for me and my education gave me a boost.

Her support kept coming, in various forms. She would email me articles, send books, and began a tradition of having a birthday cake delivered to me every December on my birthday. I emailed back more frequently. It got to a point where, when I had a good day, I couldn’t wait to tell Renate. And when I had a bad day, I couldn’t wait to tell her as well because I knew she would make me feel better. After one rough day at work, she reminded me how strong she thought I was.

“You really have the heart of a fighter,” she would say in her email, “But fortunately you also got soul, smarts and compassion. In this way you are a rich person.”

Whenever I needed encouragement, she always delivered. After a couple of years of pen pal friendship, we were emailing at least once a week. I even downloaded WhatsApp so I could talk to her more frequently.

The more I spoke to Renate, the more I learned about her family life, her culture, and a world I couldn’t have imagined prior to connecting with her. I learned that, like many Germans, she celebrates Christmas on December 24. I learned that she has three daughters (her youngest, now 28, is just a few months younger than I am) and a couple of pets. And I learned that, while she is a doctor who has an obstetrics and gynecology practice with a friend, she also has ambitions to hold a political position in Hamburg.

Mostly, across the distance, I glimpsed her kindness and thoughtfulness. She gives away bouquets of flowers weekly to her patients. I also experienced her warmth firsthand. “Sending Virtual Hugs,” she ended all of our emails.

We continued emailing often, and even made plans to meet each other in person, in Europe, in spring 2020. Renate advised that, to make the most of the experience, I should consider taking a month off from work so I could do more than visit her in Hamburg. I should get to London, Amsterdam, and other nearby cities. I had never taken a month off work or been out of the country before, so I was beyond excited to meet my pen pal and plan a trip of this magnitude.

But as I prepared for what I thought would be the trip to remember, I received the worst news I’d ever gotten. In December 2019, I learned that my grandmother, who had been struggling since suffering a stroke earlier in the year, had also been diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer and only had a few months to live. I was devastated and depressed at the thought of losing the woman who raised me.

I quickly advised Renate that I was in no state to travel anywhere. She, of course, understood—and let me know that she was there for me as I dealt with this devastating loss.

And she was as good as her word. We communicated as much as ever before. She sent handwritten notes, emails, encouraging articles, and small gifts to bring me peace. She soon became a better friend to me than some of the friends I had known personally and longer.

In March 2020, my grandmother passed away. I wasn’t quite prepared emotionally to travel just then, but I promised myself that I would definitely meet Renate one day. Just as I started to figure out how and when to reschedule the visit, the coronavirus arrived and changed life as we knew it. Travel to Europe was banned. It still is.

The loss of my grandmother and the arrival of the pandemic were twin blows that deeply saddened me. Fortunately, Renate, who had only recently become a grandmother herself, never stopped offering words of encouragement. The prayers kept coming. She advised me to think back on positive memories of my grandmother. In one email, Renate wrote, “Keep the attitude your Grandma taught you. See things as she did. Deep down in your character and soul, it will be your spiritual gold nugget. Also, remember all the good times you spent with your grandmother. She contributed a lot to who you are—a very precious person. She will send you more such gifts from heaven.”

When I read it, I smiled for the first time in months. It was good advice. It also reminded me of how my grandmother had taught the importance of communicating, of establishing bonds with others. It seemed fitting that my bond with Renate was helping me handle the loss of my grandmother.

My friendship with Renate has become so important to me that I can no longer envision a life where I was not her friend. She has become a friend forever.

I write this now, in February 2021, shortly after receiving an email from her, about how it’s 12 degrees and snowing in Hamburg. She advised me that she wanted nothing more for me than to “Be successful!” this year. She added, “Occasional flops are allowed as long as you get up after stumbling, fix your crown and continue walking [with] confidence.”

Reading the email, I thought of two things. The first is that, having grown up and lived my whole life in Southern California, I’ve never seen snow before. The second is how important it is to me that I meet Renate in person—that the emails, pictures and WhatsApp text exchanges, while so important, are not enough.

My pen pal for nearly a decade has sent me virtual hugs at the moments in life when I need them most. I am more determined than ever that, as soon as the pandemic and life make it possible, I will get on a plane, and turn all the virtual hugs into real ones.

The post To My Pen Pal in Hamburg, Germany, With Love From Watts, California appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

As I finished my first draft, lousy from start to finish, I learned that Charles Taylor—a professor whose name I’d learned two years before, when I overheard Bernard Williams tell a friend that he was among the more exciting philosophers of his generation—had written a masterly book on Hegel. I soon met Taylor and nervously asked him if he would have a quick look at my very patchy tract, which ridiculously didn’t even mention him. He showed such compassion and balance of judgment that I was instantly drawn both to the man and the scholar. I later read the first chapter of his 1975 book Hegel, in my view one of the best ever in the history of philosophical ideas. It changed my life. I knew I had found my guru.

The next time I met Taylor was in India in 1981. He had come to deliver a set of three lectures on social theory as practice, at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi. The Centre had long been a critic of western modernity. Some fellows there searched for an alternative “Indian” modernity. Taylor was excited and challenged by the atmosphere and his lectures were brilliant, original, and delivered with mastery.

At that time, I was at the other end of the political spectrum, teaching Taylor’s Hegel in Jawaharlal Nehru University, home to every shade of left group, vehemently critical of capitalism but deep in the throes of the western modernist project of Marx. At JNU the name of CSDS was unmentionable; the scholars there were denounced as “reactionary” for using Indian cultural traditions for the study of Indian politics and society.

I took Taylor away to teach Hegel to my students, subconsciously hoping I was also disconnecting him from the ‘conservative’ CSDS. But, ironically, his very presence at the Centre lifted it in my eyes (and perhaps eventually led me to quit JNU and join the CSDS decades later).

At the same time, the Centre revived Taylor’s interest in India. Over the years India’s rich diversity tremendously impacted him, and quite definitely shaped his appreciation of diversity, and that in turn had an enormous impact on Indian scholars like myself.

In order to understand this story of trans-hemispheric intellectual exchange, you have to go back quite a long ways. In the 1940s, a Marxist named Wilfred Cantwell Smith lived in Aligarh and Lahore studying Islam but also throwing himself wide open to the world of ancient Hindu traditions with their mind-boggling diversity. Cantwell Smith found that ordinary Hindus do not aspire to unity and are content to cherish their diversity as it is. Himself a Protestant, Cantwell Smith perfected the art of looking at religious traditions from the perspective of those who lived them, from the inside. Years later in the mid-1990s, when I was studying the ways that Indian secularism differs from European and American secularism, I was stunned by the insights of Cantwell Smith’s masterpiece, The Meaning and End of Religion. I was even more stunned when I excitedly began telling Charles Taylor about my discovery. Not only did he know the book well, but Cantwell Smith had been one of his more influential teachers.

This discovery came amidst decades of discussion of the issue of secularism in India beginning in the late 1980s. I published two long pieces on the subject in 1990-1991. After that, Taylor and I began discussing it regularly. Around 1994, we met with sociologist Nilüfer Göle and a little later the religion sociologist José Casanova to discuss the issue in other countries and contexts. In 1997, I edited and published a collection of essays called Secularism and Its Critics, which was when Taylor wrote on secularism for the first time in an essay called “Modes of Secularism.” At that time, the issue of secularism was important predominantly in India and Turkey, but after 9/11 its importance elsewhere shot through the roof. In 2007, Taylor published A Secular Age, which completely transformed the terms of the debate by taking us to an altogether different level of secularity, one presupposed by western secularization and political secularism.

Wilfred Cantwell Smith at Harvard University.

It took a true exchange of ideas between scholars and traditions to move this important philosophical conversation forward. Taylor always generously claims that his understanding of political secularism is influenced by my work on the diversity-oriented Indian secularism. But without Taylor’s theoretical work, a conception of distinctive Indian secularism as, among other things, a response to religious diversity rather than as born out of battles with the church could not have emerged. All of these ideas came into play when I wrote The Promise of India’s Secular Democracy in 2010.

So how did this happen? I think that India’s rich diversity originally had an impact on Taylor via Cantwell Smith. And he in turn has influenced innumerable people like myself in understanding the meaning and significance of diversity. What Smith received from India, he passed on to Taylor, and what Taylor received from Smith, he passed on to Indians like me. And so on. These intellectual circles are much larger than we imagine!

Our exchange was also deeply personal. For some Indians, like myself, intimacy and learning are closely related. If we had only exchanged ideas, I would have learned less than half of what I have from Taylor. He has given me a framework with which to think, shaped my most foundational ideas, and taught me how to understand human beings. None of this would have been possible, I have to say, if we were not close personal friends.

I think our experience has been typical of the way that Taylor works, as a philosopher and a friend. He is committed to deep pluralism, always marked by a lack of finality. He is suspicious of doctrines driven by a single principle. And, very importantly, he reaches out not only to the specialist, to people in his own philosophical circles, but to the wider public. His thoughts are constantly evolving, and he always manages to change the terms of debates in which he intervenes. Taylor is Catholic in his own way. He understands that profound divergences of religious beliefs and practices coexist with equally profound similarities in faiths. To have a particular faith, for him, is to be simultaneously open to other faiths, including faith in the human spirit and human reason. And finally, particularly at least in the last two decades, he has constantly attempted to escape Eurocentricity, not by superficial leaping toward other cultures but by slowly shrinking the centrality and significance of his own, by putting his own world in its place.

Taylor is a remarkable thinker not least because there are few ideas that he completely rejects or for that matter wholly embraces. He is able to do so because though he stands on one side, he helps us to imagine what it is like to be on the other. Taylor almost always helps us to see from both sides of the fence.

The post How Intimacy Fuels Intellectual Breakthroughs appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Don’t eat the spaghetti, she whispered. It’s funny
spaghetti—her hand raised to one corner
of her mouth, speaking out the other side,
conspiratorial grin I’d come to know, naively
wise.
       I wore my chopsticks to the party, the pair
with inlaid fragments of iridescent shell,
wide X holding my bun tight atop my head.
How do you get it to stay like that,
she asked. Ripped tangles, I thought. Easy,
I said,
       then slipped each out to show her. Do mine,
she said. We found a pillowed, dark corner, entered
our own orbit: dense, whisper-enclosed zone
blurring the party’s edges. Another thing
I’d come to know: this intensity, this closeness.

I sat behind her, extended my left hand to lift
so much wide lightness—bright, dark hanks sliding out
through my grasp as I pulled and twisted, lost them,
gathered again, twisted into swirl—one chopstick,
almost the other—but her hair fell like water,
like flood.
       So far from the party and my new beau
I would later kiss until dawn in his truck—not
yet. Back to my task of gather, spin, and pin.
Make her happy. Make her my friend. Shape
her as she wants to be. For a thin instant, both
chopsticks held
       what might be called a bun, which then flew
wide, loose as laughter flying down, the ornate pair
dangling quotation marks draped around her head.
How many times would I try reshaping her strands
beyond their gravitational incline and curve?
All must fall, even the healthiest and most shiny.

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My mind was fuzzy, but the last thing I remembered was riding my bike toward the edge of a hilltop, with the intent to gap to a patch of concrete at the hill’s base. In doing so, I would have to air over a small metal electrical box that stuck out of the hillside. I had pulled this trick off countless times, and there was no doubt in my mind that things would go off without a hitch.

Unfortunately, I was wrong.

Injuries are a fact of life when you ride BMX, which stands for bicycle motocross. At first BMX was strictly a racing sport, but it has since evolved into a freestyle pursuit in which riders do whatever tricks they like in any place that works—from dirt jumps to skate park ramps to 10-stair handrails. Riding BMX in the streets, a big part of the thrill is finding obstacles that weren’t designed for extreme sports, and making them work for tricks.

And therein lies the sport’s allure. As the late BMX legend Dave Mirra said, “I’d risk the fall, just to know how it feels to fly.”

While it’s true that the thrill is fundamental to the BMX appeal, for me, riding is a more complicated matter, one tied up with childhood friendship and life-changing risks.

My BMX obsession started in 10th grade, when a classmate named Van became high-school-famous for posting photos of himself doing wall-rides in his dining room. The first time I met Van he was riding his bike full-speed down a garage ramp. He boosted off of a speed bump and into the air before pedaling back around to introduce himself. We hit it off right away. I was blown away by his confidence, and I soon noticed that when I was with him that same confidence bubbled up in me. I’d watch him ride with local pros, and imagined myself pulling off the stunts that seemed to come so naturally to him. But whenever I tried to ride Van’s bike, the magic that allowed him to leave the ground seemed to dissipate as soon as I touched the handlebars. My interest stayed frozen at the level of spectacle.

High school ended, and Van and I lost touch. But a few years later, while studying in Ireland, I found a man selling a top-of-the-line BMX bike for a fraction of what it was worth. Being pretty much alone in Ireland, my bike became my closest companion. I spent the next few months practicing hops, spins, and wheelies. I could almost hear my old friend yelling advice at me, telling me to pull my front end up harder or to remember to counter-steer when my bike began to roll backwards.

Though I was a novice with a foreign accent, Galway’s local BMX crew was quick to take me under their wing, and I soon discovered what’s since become my favorite thing to do on my bike—gaps. The term can be used as either a verb or a noun, and describes an area that can be jumped over, or the action of jumping such an area. You could say that you’ve gapped an area once you’ve jumped from one space or object to another, without touching anything in between.

I knew I was hooked the day I gapped a set of stairs that ran down to the water in my local park. The set was larger than anything I had ever jumped before, and the wet stone walkway at the bottom made for an unreliable landing space.

For weeks, I had stared at the spot and imagined myself jumping it, but was always too afraid to actually try. Then, one day, I went for it. I must have looked inept hurling myself down those stairs as clumsily as I did, but I’ll never forget the fleeting feeling of freedom that came to me as I flew through the air.

Most everything I’d learned in my life had come to me slowly and incrementally, and I was used to messing things up a few times before I succeeded. On that day, it felt great to do something right on the first try. When I jumped off the stairs, the desire not to fall and die was so strong that it pushed the very idea of failure out of my mind. As soon as my tires reconnected with the ground, I knew I had to chase that feeling. I’ve tried to carry this state of mind into everything I do, not thinking about the multiple tries it might take to get something done. If you remove the idea of redos from your mind, you’re much more likely to succeed the first time.

When my semester abroad wrapped up, I packed my bike into a giant box that ended up weighing almost 50 pounds, and brought it home with me. I didn’t realize just how attached I’d grown to my most beloved possession until I went to collect it from baggage claim. A note from TSA alerting me that they’d opened the box triggered a pang of violated concern in my gut.

Soon after returning to the states, I packed my bike up one more time, and prepared to attempt the largest gap of my life, moving 3,500 miles from my childhood home in Baltimore to Los Angeles.

Once I arrived in L.A., it felt like I had stepped into the center of the BMX world. When I needed new parts for my bike, I took it to OSS, a store in the Fashion District that runs the biggest BMX blog on the Internet. At the store, a few of the pros regularly featured on the site were hanging out and were quick to introduce themselves to me using their first names when I walked in. And after a few months, I ran into Van, who had just moved out here, while we were on our bikes. On that day, BMX reinvigorated a friendship I thought I’d lost.

One of the best things about riding in L.A. is the group street rides. I’ve gotten the chance to ride with almost all of my idols, as nearly every pro rider makes at least one trip to Southern California each year. On a recent Saturday, several hundred riders headed out en masse from Thee Block, a BMX culture store in East Hollywood. No roads were shut down, and no police cars escorted us.

A group of BMX riders mobbing the streets of downtown L.A

Most riders—including me—go without brakes. We stop by dragging our feet against our back tires or the ground. While this can lead to high-speed accidents and ruined shoes, it makes bikes simpler to fix, more maneuverable without any pesky brake cables, and generally sleeker-looking.

Riding in such a large pack, no stopping was required.

Through some telepathic choreography, we began weaving through the gridlock on Santa Monica Boulevard in a great snaking motion that didn’t bother slowing down for red lights. At the top of a hill on West Fourth Street we attempted something equal parts reckless and fun. All 300 of us rocketed down the hill, riding straight across the bridge that runs over the 110 Freeway into downtown Los Angeles.

On the other side of the bridge, we were met with a wall of cars. Some riders saw this as more of a challenge than an inconvenience, cutting and weaving through the mesh of traffic. One boy even went so far as to jump his bike onto the hood of a stopped taxicab. To the disbelief of the cab’s passenger, the kid rode straight off the back of the car, rolling his bike right over the rooftop taxi sign.

Our final destination was a ramp made from parking barriers placed atop a concrete incline in a private lot. A security detail was there to greet us, but once the guards saw what we were doing, they didn’t make us leave. One guard commented, with, perhaps, a tinge of envy, that we had “a hell of a party” going on.

A young boy turned to his father, and asked if it would be okay for him to try riding the ramp, saying he was afraid that the other bikers would make fun of him for not being good enough. After a few words of encouragement, the boy decided to give it a shot. He pedaled hard, made it up the incline, and tapped his front tire on the base of the parking barrier. As he rode back to his dad, the riders he passed bent down to give him high-fives.

Fast-forward a couple of months to that day that found me in shock trauma, my arms tangled amidst tubes. I hadn’t quite cleared the gap, and even with a helmet, the impact of my fall was enough to knock me unconscious. My best guess was that my tires had slipped out when I landed short on the wet grass.

Once I recovered from my concussion and climbed back on the BMX saddle, the lasting pain was one of embarrassment. After riding away from countless close calls, my “big crash” was a slip-and-fall less than two feet, into a grassy hill.

Still, you could trip and break your neck right outside your front door, no bike required. My fall that day—unimpressive as it seems—could have been fatal. I often ride alone, but fortunately for me, on that day, Van was with me. BMX nearly did me in, but Van made sure I lived to ride again.

The post Why BMX Bike Riding Is a Matter of Life and Death appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

 
These days, we want to be with each other but also elsewhere, connected to wherever else we want to be, because what we value most is control over where we put our attention. Our manners have evolved to accommodate our new priorities. When you’re out to dinner with friends, you can’t assume that you have their undivided attention. Cameron, a college junior in New Hampshire, says that when his friends have dinner, “and I hate this, everyone puts their phones next to them when they eat. And then, they’re always checking them.”

The night before at dinner he had texted a friend sitting next to him (“ ’S’up, dude?”) just to get his attention. Cameron’s objection is common, for this is the reality: When college students go to dinner, they want the company of their friends in the dining hall and they also want the freedom to go to their phones. To have both at the same time, they observe what some call the “rule of three”: When you are with a group at dinner you have to check that at least three people have their heads up from their phones before you give yourself permission to look down at your phone. So conversation proceeds—but with different people having their “heads up” at different times.

I meet with Cameron and seven of his friends. One of them, Eleanor, describes the rule of three as a strategy of continual scanning:

Let’s say we are seven at dinner. We all have our phones. You have to make sure that at least two people are not on their phones or looking down to check something—like a movie time on Google or going on Facebook. So you need sort of a rule of two or three. So I know to keep, like, two or three in the mix so that other people can text or whatever.

It’s my way of being polite. I would say that conversations, well, they’re pretty, well, fragmented. Everybody is kind of in and out. Yeah, you have to say, “Wait, what . . .” and sort of have people fill you in a bit when you drop out.

The effect of the rule of three is what you might expect. As Eleanor says, conversation is fragmented. And everyone tries to keep it light.

 
Even a Silent Phone Disconnects Us

Keeping talk light when phones are on the landscape becomes a new social grace. One of Eleanor’s friends explains that if a conversation at dinner turns serious and someone looks at a phone, that is her signal to “lighten things up.” And she points out that the rule of three is a way of being polite even when you’re not at the dinner table. When “eyes are down” at phones, she says, “conversation stays light well beyond dinner.”

When I first planned the research that would lead to this book, my idea was to focus on our new patterns of texting and messaging. What made them compelling? Unique? But early in my study, when I met with these New Hampshire students, their response to my original question was to point me to another question that they thought was more important. “I would put it this way,” says Cameron. “There are fewer conversations—not with the people you’re texting, but with the people around you!” As he says this, we are in a circle of eight, talking together, and heads are going down to check phones. A few try not to, but it is a struggle.

Cameron sums up what he sees around him. “Our texts are fine. It’s what texting does to our conversations when we are together, that’s the problem.”

It was a powerful intuition. What phones do to in-person conversation is a problem. Studies show that the mere presence of a phone on the table (even a phone turned off) changes what people talk about. If we think we might be interrupted, we keep conversations light, on topics of little controversy or consequence. And conversations with phones on the landscape block empathic connection. If two people are speaking and there is a phone on a nearby desk, each feels less connected to the other than when there is no phone present. Even a silent phone disconnects us.

So it is not surprising that in the past 20 years we’ve seen a 40 percent decline in the markers for empathy among college students, most of it within the past 10 years. It is a trend that researchers link to the new presence of digital communications.

Why do we spend so much time messaging each other if we end up feeling less connected to each other? In the short term, online communication makes us feel more in charge of our time and self-presentation.

If we text rather than talk, we can have each other in amounts we can control. And texting and email and posting let us present the self we want to be. We can edit and retouch.

I call it the Goldilocks effect: We can’t get enough of each other if we can have each other at a digital distance—not too close, not too far, just right.

But human relationships are rich, messy, and demanding. When we clean them up with technology, we move from conversation to the efficiencies of mere connection. I fear we forget the difference. And we forget that is a difference or that things were ever different. Studies show that when children hear less adult talk, they talk less. If we turn toward our phones and away from our children, we will start them off with a deficit of which they will be unaware. It won’t be only about how much they talk. It will be about how much they understand the people they’re talking with.

Indeed, when young people say, “Our texts are fine,” they miss something important. What feels fine is that in the moment, so many of their moments are enhanced by digital reminders that they are wanted, a part of things. A day online has many of these “moments of more.” But as digital connection becomes an ever larger part of their day, they risk ending up with lives of less.

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We’ve never seen one so close up before—
head cocked to scan the tributary bank
with one eye toward the sky, one toward the river.
Into his own reflection, he dips his bill
and snags a frog or fish he chokes down whole,
granting us permission not to speak.

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Our societal norms – as reflected in our laws and public policy – focus a great deal of attention on our familial relations and our workplace relations. But friends simply don’t register – these are human relations beyond the reach of the state.

As they should be, you might think. Nothing seems more off limits in a liberal society than telling people with whom they ought to spend their free time. And yet, it is hard not to notice that the liberal state routinely gives people many incentives to sort themselves into families, rather than into groups of friends. From our criminal law to our tax laws, we find strategies to protect and strengthen familial bonds.

There is nothing that should prevent our liberal state, then, from encouraging and nurturing friendships as a matter of public policy. But what would such a strategy look like?

For one, we could imagine employment laws that enabled us to take care of sick friends, not just family members. As it stands, the Family and Medical Leave Act requires employers to give us time off to take care of sick kin. Yet, study after study tell us that non-kin support is actually more curative and helps us live longer. The law could help the institution of friendship by allowing us to make claims against work and the state – giving us the time to perform acts of friendship.

We could also envision a system of taxes that didn’t only give us deductions for adding to the country’s population or buying homes we might not really be able to afford. It seems right that little tax incentives to give charity make the world a better place. But some nudges to incentivize us to drive our friends back from their next colonoscopy – and some small deductions for celebrating our friends’ rites of passage (how about making travel to weddings deductible, much like unreimbursed work travel is?) seem perfectly unobtrusive ways to reinforce the value of friendship in society.

Unfortunately, when the government fails to respect and think about friendship, we have a tendency to make bad decisions. When governments give people vouchers to move out of their neighborhoods to higher income communities – hoping that the change of scenery will give people a boost out of a life of reproduced poverty – we disrupt friendship networks and sources of support. It is thus no wonder that these programs actually can leave the poor families “moving up” feeling alienated. When we insist that hospitals consult with family before friends to help make end-of-life decisions for the incapacitated, we are likely following family wishes rather than respecting the autonomy of the individual. Friends often know us better – so shouldn’t the law, as a default, defer more to our “BFF” to make some of these calls on our behalf?

Sociologists have sounded alarms recently about the decline of friendship. Notwithstanding our elaborate technologies that enable us to be in touch more often and notwithstanding our promiscuous “friending” practices, it may be that we are often failing to develop intimate bonds outside the family. It is unrealistic to think that some quick tinkering with our public policies will restructure our patterns of affinity and lead to greater social cohesion. But it is dangerous for our laws only to focus on the private ordering within the family and the economy and to ignore our chosen bonds that provide us with so much support, fulfillment, and community.

Our new Congress won’t be able to agree on much; but promoting friendship seems to be a nonpartisan value. They may not be friends with each other but they all value friendship. In these times of economic stress, it is worth remembering that friends can’t always take care of themselves – and that friendship itself may not be able to take care of itself either.

Ethan J. Leib is a Professor of Law at UC-Hastings and a Visiting Professor of Law at Fordham Law School. He is the author of Friend v. Friend: The Transformation of Friendship – and What the Law Has To Do With It (Oxford 2011).

*Photo courtesy of Ed Yourdon.

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