Time as a personal and political relationship

Signifying Nothing: On intuition and the limits of structured thinking

There are three main arguments in favor of veganism. The first, and (to my mind) most logical, concerns the environment. Seeing the film “Cowspiracy” on campus this weekend reminded me of the devastating effects of animal agriculture, and reignited my enthusiasm and personal commitment to resisting environmentally destructive habits. Without going into too much detail, producing one pound of beef requires 2,500 gallons of water, compared to 304 gallons for a pound of almonds (which are often demonized for their water consumption), and 34 gallons for a pound of broccoli.
“Cowspiracy” convincingly argued that raising cattle for beef is clearing rainforests, wasting water and producing reckless amounts of methane. However, the movie didn’t limit itself to beef production, but aimed to criticize all animal agriculture. To do this, the film had to appeal to vegan argument number two: the appeal to animal sentience. Philosopher Peter Singer has famously argued that we should not eat animals because, as far as we can reasonably tell, animals can feel pain, and we should not cause unnecessary pain. This argument has stuck with me ever since we debated animal consumption in “Moral Problems” my first year at Bowdoin. With the language of “speciesism” (privileging the pleasure of humans over the life of animals) I could finally justify something I’d felt for a long time—that eating animals made me feel mean, icky and kind of uncomfortable. As a kid, I would refuse to eat any meat that had bones in it, choosing chicken nuggets and hot dogs over drumsticks and fish. Eating around bones reminded me that my food had once been a living, feeling animal.
“Cowspiracy” really tries to make its viewers feel icky. In a pivotal moment in the film, the documentarian visits a backyard duck farm and closely watches a man kill a duck. It was gross. However, this scene didn’t really have anything to do with large-scale agribusiness and environmental degradation, the main topics of the film.
“Cowspiracy” also features a scene that appeals strongly to the third argument: health veganism. The filmmaker in “Cowspiracy” interviews a tan, leathery and lean older doctor who talks about how he and his patients have enjoyed exceptional health by following a vegan diet. The funniest part of the film is when this doctor is joking about the cognitive dissonance required for people to consume dairy, which he terms “baby calf fluid.” For this doctor, eating animal products just didn’t make sense for living a healthy lifestyle. There are many arguments for and against health veganism. The China Study is a good place to start, and the internet has no shortage of opinions.
But this article isn’t really about veganism as much as it is about arguments. After spending an hour accusing large-scale cattle farms of destroying the environment, why does “Cowspiracy” show a man beheading a duck? For a while, I’ve been caught up with the various debates over veganism. For some, abstaining from animal products is about helping themselves. For others, it’s about helping animals. Others care most about the environmental degradation of the planet.
Why do we decide to do what we do? How do we make the decisions that shape our identities? Liberal academia supposes that we can rationalize the world by breaking it down, pulling it apart and dividing knowledge into disciplines. Secularism provides no language to earnestly engage with generalities. The world speaks to us, all the time, but the death of God makes it just about impossible to think about things in their entirety.
Academic disciplines impose borders on knowledge. Borders, being functions of power, keep some people comfortable at the expense of others. In his inaugural address, Clayton Rose warned of “the threat to free and robust intellectual discourse” of those who privilege comfort over academic engagement. It seemed to me that President Rose was implicitly attacking the “trigger warnings” without using that phrase directly. While I don’t intend to put words in President Rose’s mouth, he didn’t specify where this threat came from, or how it manifests itself. However, by speaking vaguely, President Rose set limits on his discussion which allowed his listeners to remain comfortable, while positioning himself as the authoritative voice on academic discourse.
I have never heard of a conversation truly being shut down by trigger warnings. Rather, students use these warnings to explore their own boundaries, understand how a conversation makes them feel and convey their discomfort to others. It’s ironic that, after they were criticized for preventing conversations, trigger warnings became a hot-button, widely discussed issue.
The discourse on discourse also reveals an implicit boundary between academic conversations and material action. President Rose’s speech suggests that it’s fine to be “unsafe” and take risks in the classroom. However, a common argument against divesting Bowdoin’s endowment from fossil fuel companies is that we’d be risking our endowment for a symbolic action that we can’t be sure will work. The dualistic approach to material and symbolism is deeply ingrained in secular thinking. Yet, we don’t make decisions in pure rationality. Intuition exists, and beliefs guide even our most mundane actions. What is lost when we break down beliefs into separate parts? As the recent Intersections Teach-In showed us, people can understand and respond to a real and urgent problem by transcending disciplinary boundaries.
And yet we can and should not rely merely on intuition. Many of our instincts are racist, sexist, homophobic or simply selfish. But perhaps, within the limitations of academic disciplines and modes of thinking, we don’t give enough credit to instinct. We already synthesize information with intuition all the time. Sometimes it helps to follow your gut.

Signifying Nothing: The alternate realities of individual beliefs

It's almost December. In or around December every year, Christian Western culture changes. The anticipation of Christmas makes many of us do funny things. We don ugly sweaters, drink an unbelievably heavy beverage made with raw eggs, and subject ourselves to the saccharinity of songs such as “Christmas Shoes.”
And, of course, there are the movies. An entire subgenre of film that both celebrates and exploits the mythology that surrounds this one important day. Some movies are classics, (“Miracle on 34th Street,” “It’s A Wonderful Life”) others are kitschy but fun (“The Santa Clause,” “Elf”) and many are downright offensive (allegedly, there’s a “Christmas Shoes” movie).
Any decent Christmas movie has some kind of magic. Whether that magic consists of ghosts, an express train or just plain-old love, Christmas challenges the rationalist way we tend to think for the rest of the year. At the best of times, I can put aside my anti-consumerist critiques and accept how Christmas magic just makes everything OK. Christmas magic is the biggest cliché on earth. Nothing could be gaudier than a children’s choir singing about angels in the background of a Lifetime movie. And yet, social rituals are the closest thing to magic that we have. It’s amazing to have a society where many people put a tree inside their house and listen to the same music for a month. It’s even more amazing that I love this shit. I enjoy seeing dogs dressed up as reindeers, looking at blinding neon lights and drinking peppermint lattes.
But I don’t know anyone who loves Christmas more than my sister. Amanda wears reindeer socks in July, and watches “Holiday in Handcuffs” and “Christmas with the Kranks” in August. Most importantly, my sister genuinely and unironically believes in Santa Claus. Several years ago, my mother and I decided to break the “truth” to Amanda. We tried, time after time, to empirically prove to Amanda that there is no man who lives at the North Pole and delivers presents across the world on every Christmas Eve. But our rationalism never took hold. She was (and is) too deep into the Christmas mythology to ever change her mind.
Religion is strange, as an academic subject. The secularization of knowledge prevents scholars from openly buying into any religious dogma. Rather, academics have to talk about religion in conditional phrases, outsider language. And there’s a funny thing that secular liberal education does to disarm radical or anti-rationalist ideology. Consider my friend, who believes in ghosts. She once told me that it isn’t that she just interprets something as a ghost which someone else interprets otherwise. She actually believes in ghosts. School will often trick us into thinking that there’s an objective reality that we each interpret and signify differently. As if one culture’s alchemy is another person’s chemistry. Of course, for our academic culture, alchemy is the wacky, outdated ancestor of legitimate science.
Unlike my sister, my thoughts have been really, really expensive. As I approach the end of my seventh semester at Bowdoin, I’ve undertaken hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of education. As I mentioned in an earlier article (“Intellectual privilege, money and harmful exclusivity at elite institutions”), Amanda could never have that privilege. As a woman with Down syndrome, she’ll never attend an institution like Bowdoin, and never develop the critical skills to investigate Truth. But despite the capital that’s been funneled into my brain, I don’t have a monopoly on saying what exists. I can speculate, but I know literally nothing about how it feels to be someone else. Instead of using my education to try to find objective truths, I should learn to accept other realities.
I’m afraid that I’m falling into a trap. By writing this article, I am using critical inquiry to justify someone else’s belief. I’m mansplaining to my own sister why her favorite cultural narrative is not just an illusion. But as long as I have the privilege of intellectual authority, I might as well give it up.
So yes, Amanda, there is a Santa Claus—but you didn’t need to be told.

Signifying Nothing

Time as a personal and political relationship

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

Jesse Ortiz

Columnist

November 11, 2015

How’s your relationship with time?

A few weeks ago, my friend mentioned over sushi that her recent struggles with sleep were connected to her relationship with time. That conversation got me thinking about my own interactions with time. I’ve often treated time as a high school lover, when every second together feels apocalyptic, fleeting moments never quite enough to fulfill my emotional and physical needs. In other situations, passing time feels excruciating, like being an eight-year-old waiting for my mom to finish shoe shopping during a buy-one-get-one sale, or swimming out of a pool of lime Jell-O. Time can also be the friend you don’t really want around, the one that keeps you in the Union for the fifteen minutes before your next class, or makes you lie in bed and listen to The National for an hour on Friday before you start drinking. This kind of relationship can drive you homicidal—often we want nothing more than to kill time, abuse it and cast it aside as if the present moment isn’t important.

Time does matter.

However, how can something so immaterial have such a profound impact on my life? Time is not an object, or an experience, but the function that connects objects and experiences as they take on different forms. From the individual perspective, this process feels continuous. Our sense is that time is constantly flowing, a universal condition of physical and emotional states. Time seems to be a great equalizer, the same train we’re all riding through the universe. But are all the seats on the train of time worth the same amount? What if there were a first class car in front, with lots of legroom and an open bar, but an “economy” car in back, with camped benches, crying babies and overpriced snacks?

In Marxist theory, material conditions determine social, political and ideological structures in society. But matter is determined by more than its form and position in space. Time engenders objects, and allow them to circulate and change. To fight oppression, we have to consider how people across socio-economic classes experience time. Do you have free time to leisure, reflect and unwind? Is time something that you can plan out and control? Time management is a privilege, reflecting one’s temporal wealth. Consider those who must wait in Emergency Rooms or free clinics for basic health care, or have to sit in bus stations instead of taking a cab. Unequal access to time perpetuates inequality by preventing oppressed people from improving their material status. As they say, time is money.

The power of time can manifest itself through state and corporate control. A few weeks ago, we all set our clocks back for daylight saving, an outdated and inconvenient tradition that we nevertheless obey. This weekend, I realized the psychological impact of time when my iPhone clock mysteriously malfunctioned. The clock would freeze periodically and then adjust itself, so the time was off enough to affect my schedule, but not so wrong that I could tell it was messed up. For several days, I felt like I was in some Twilight Zone, trying to navigate a space that was out of my control. When I brought this up to my friend, he said, “How could your phone be wrong? That’s supposed to be the right time!” Without a reliable iPhone, I couldn’t set my watch, or measure the inaccuracy of the clock in Moulton’s light room. By depending on my phone’s clock, I had allowed Apple to become my authority on time.

Recently, I’ve been aiming to understand and improve my relationship with time. Trying to find just a few minutes each day to meditate has shown me how structured my schedule can me, but mindfulness makes me consider my engagement with time. I’ve started planning meals at 12:55 or 5:55, which my friends refer to as “Jesse Time.” The five minute cushion often allows me to beat the meal-time rush. For a long time, I’ve obsessed about punctuality, and allowed other people’s lateness to put me in a bad mood. Now, I’m beginning to understand that we all experience time in different ways. By rethinking my urgency for timeliness, I can release my control over temporal means of production. In doing so, I can consider how my treatment of time affects my personal or political power.

It’s about time.

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