What math can teach us about religious ideology

Signifying Nothing: More than goods: On the importance of economic wealth

In the United States, scarcity often manifests itself as excess. For example, Mississippi has both the highest rate of food insecurity and the third highest rate of obesity nationwide. In a food system that privileges products that are convenient, marketable and, ultimately, cheap, many can only afford to eat against their physical needs. When a burger costs one dollar but a salad costs seven dollars, calories are cheap, but nutrition is expensive.
We can apply the logic of the American obesity epidemic to wealth disparities in modern society. You may be familiar with the TV show “Hoarders.” According to the show’s description on Google, each episode “profiles two people on the verge of a personal crisis, all caused by the fact that they are unable to part with even the tiniest possessions.” The show tends to feature “average-looking” Americans, and claim that these people are afflicted by psychological conditions that constitute “hoarding,” the accumulation of excess stuff.
Bill Gates and Donald Trump have never been featured on “Hoarders.” The billions of dollars that these men possess are different from the old books, food or animals that the people on “Hoarders” cling to. Like junk food, the stuff we consider trash is readily available in America. People can accumulate piles of useless goods because it’s relatively easy to buy things. Hoarding, like obesity, demonstrates the extreme of a logic of consumption based on accessibility over quality, on what you can get over what’s good for you.
When I was in elementary school, my mother bought me a new backpack each fall. And with all the other expenses relating to a new school year, the end of August and beginning of September can be a tough time, financially. Because of this, my mom never wanted to spend more than $20 on a backpack. Inevitably, these inexpensive bags would fail before the end of the year, with broken straps or gaping holes that made these bags a hassle during spring rain. By fifth grade, I envied those kids who’d had their significantly-more-than-$20 monogrammed L.L. Bean backpacks since kindergarten. Those bags were sturdy, practical, and (most importantly) signified the longevity of an early investment. The monogrammed initials were icing on the cake, the symbol of ownership and permanence on a quality consumer good.
If you’ve read many of my columns, you know that I like to use anecdotes from elementary school. Often, childhood memories contain our most distilled—and often unarticulated—feelings of shame and exclusion. I was recently talking to my friend Julia, who mentioned having a similar experience with L.L. Bean bags, until she, like me, invested in a quality backpack that she carries to this day. Another friend, Will, mentioned his frustration with having the same sturdy but unhip bag for fifteen years of his childhood. Even small indicators of social position can have effects far into the future.
We see the paradox of consumerism far beyond elementary schools. Many low-income people in America have smart phones, expensive sneakers and other products that symbolize modern comfort or excess but are fairly easy to attain. If we expand the backpack analogy, all consumer goods are cheap throwaways compared with long-term wealth as found in mutual funds or property ownership.
Towards the end of last summer, I helped a family friend move some books out of her home. She, her partner, and her daughter were moving out of the apartment they had rented for years into a co-op that they would own. This friend shared that she was trying to make her teenage daughter understand why they were moving, why it mattered to build equity.
“This is what it all comes down to, you know?” she said while driving to the thrift store. “Economic inequality: when your parents are aging, will you inherit money or have to pay to care for them?” Two weeks ago I remembered this stark summary of systemic inequality, when reading a fellow student's insightful analysis of intersectional discrimination. He pointed out that discrimination manifests itself in ways beyond race, such as “where I live, what my parents do, what school I attend, what I study and what kind of cars my parents drive.” Though the cultural significance of these factors can vary, home location, education and car ownership are directly tied to someone’s wealth.
It can be impossible to determine a person’s wealth by how they look. Like food insecurity, there is no one way that economic disempowerment appears. Hoarding, like obesity, represents an unjust system rebelling against itself. If consumer goods are empty calories, health is wealth. However, wealth is never individualized, but constituted within a social order. And when a few people reserve economic power for themselves, the rest of us inevitably suffer. So, to quote a phrase, property is theft.

Signifying Nothing: Eating it up: Bowdoin meal culture as networking

“Let’s get a meal!” you say, enthusiastically, to an acquaintance you’d like to know better. At Bowdoin, an invitation for a meal represents more than just food. “Getting a meal” is a common way to become familiar with people outside our immediate friend groups, or legitimize relationships with friends of friends or casual hookups. It’s also important who you don't get a meal with…maybe you don’t want that casual hookup to be part of your weekday life.
Eating with new people at Bowdoin helps us build connections to campus groups, and discover opportunities for ourselves. This is, in a word, networking. Like an “informational interview,” getting a meal with an acquaintance is performative. You want to project the best, most fitting version of yourself to a new person, while trying to appear casual and composed. Whether we like it or not, every part of the meal—from the choice of dining hall, to the way we hold our silverware—affects the impression we make on other people.
Getting a meal is a skill. As Julia Mead succinctly explained in an article last semester, the Senior Etiquette Dinner teaches Bowdoin students to perform an elite class identity. Beyond the dinner, there are plenty of subtle ways that Bowdoin teaches us to behave. Seminar-style classes teach us to participate in business meetings. College houses teach us to plan events. And getting meals teaches us to network.
When I was in high school, my junior year English teacher once began a class by playing the music from 2001: A Space Odyssey and holding a box of cookies over his head.
“Mallomars,” Mr. Baldwin said, “are perfect. The graham cracker base, marshmallow filling, and decadent chocolate coating is truly heavenly.”
He then distributed the cookies around the class.
“You know, food is love,” he told us. “Enjoy the cookies.”
My teacher then had us each write us essay about the Mallomar brand cookie, much to the chagrin (thanks for the vocab, Mr. Baldwin!) of many students in the class.
Mr. Baldwin’s teaching could fit in with the cheesiest of Lifetime movies, but I never did forget that lesson. Sharing a meal with someone is not just intimate, but sacred. Every religion that I know of follows several traditions based around food. This past Sunday, I couldn’t help remembering the pastries and pasta that my Italian family would share every Easter after gorging ourselves on chocolate all morning.
Is there anything sacred about eating with someone at Bowdoin? Meals here are often scheduled far in advance, and squeezed between various other commitments. Food can provide a rare opportunity to reflect on yourself and connect with another person. It can help alleviate the stress of countless other duties. But often, a meal becomes another social obligation, requiring the same performative self-awareness as a meeting or a class. Does that kind of self-awareness violate the sacredness of eating, making lunch sacrilegious?
Consciousness and love are not mutually exclusive. Bowdoin promotes an ideal of social leadership and financial success. But although Bowdoin’s culture socializes us to adopt bourgeois habits, we don’t need to fully accept or reject an upper class identity. If we give ourselves entirely to an elitist ideal, we’ll end up hurting the people that interfere with our self-interested goals. However, to reject the Bowdoin ideal wholesale comes with its own kind of dishonesty. It’s a privilege to learn how to refine the skills necessary for a high-power career. At Bowdoin, every one of us participates in a culture of people with immense social and economic power, and it’s worth being aware of the way that culture shapes us.
When I was growing up, my family drank a lot of diet soda. Now, I often hesitate in the dining hall, checking my impulse to drink a product as corporate, artificial and innutritious as Coke Zero. But tater tots and fried chicken have never been my comfort food. At my grandmother’s house, cans of Diet Pepsi were as ubiquitous as loaves of Italian bread. As soon as my sister and I would walk into her home, we would hug my grandmother hello and then make our way to the fridge, trusting that it would be full of shiny silver cans. Yes, Pepsi profits every time we purchase its products. But those cans came straight from my grandmother’s heart. Even though “getting a meal” may be a kind of networking, eating with others often leads to lasting connections and a strong community. After all, food is love.

Signifying Nothing

What math can teach us about religious ideology

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

February 24, 2016

The Fundamental Theorem of Algebra states: Every polynomial equation having complex coefficients and degree ≥1 has at least one complex root. A complex number has the form a + bi, where a and b are real numbers (which are numbers like 1, -½, π, 507,857, etc.) and i is the square root of -1. So, the Theorem says that, if you have a polynomial (such as 17x³+ 2x²+ 8), with complex numbers multiplying the x’s you can always find a way to write this polynomial as a product of complex numbers.

This is incredible! In my high school algebra class, we kind of glossed over complex roots, which made equations like x² + 4 = 0 impossible to solve. But, if you throw in an i, suddenly all real polynomials have complex roots. To quote Professor Michael King, “Pretty much any number you can think of can be written as a product of complex numbers.”

i is called the “imaginary unit.” Because of this, i gets the reputation of being—in contrast to the “real” numbers—something that doesn’t actually exist. However, real numbers (and integers and natural numbers) don’t actually exist any more than complex numbers. Numbers aren’t things that we hold or see or smell, but ideas that can signify many things, and the ways that mathematicians use and understand numbers has been changing for as long as we’ve been counting.

As a liberal, it can be hard to talk about God. In the United States, we are morally determined to keep church away from state, to keep one ideology from seeping into and influencing another. This was made apparent to me in third grade, when my public elementary school stopped saying the Pledge of Allegiance because they didn’t want to impose the “under God” onto little kids. We often talk about “those conservative Christians” who are trying to teach kids Creationism at the expense of our beloved Science. In the mainstream conception of America, the state government dictates social interaction, the public sphere, while religion guides people’s separate, private lives.

The “under God” bit is not the most insidious part of the Pledge of Allegiance. The blind patriotism of flag worship is creepy, and it seems delusional to claim that there is “justice for all” in an America stratified by enormous wealth inequality and violently divided by race. Today, a flag stands on Bowdoin’s main quad, that same flag that has been used to justify years of war, colonialism and systemic discrimination. The American flag towers over the campus, but we downplay any signs of religious denomination in our chapel, where religion becomes something extra-curricular, welcome at Bowdoin but not a part of mainstream life.

As our American flag testifies, institutions like Bowdoin believe and worship all kinds of things. It’s amazing how much faith and trust must go into just buying something at the C-Store. We swipe a plastic card in a machine to change the balance on a student’s account, which is connected to an account at a bank, which is connected to countless people and institutions. But for any of that to happen, we all have to agree that money has value, and the little numbers on a screen mean the same things as money. We have to feel guilt and shame when we can’t pay money we owe, and feel happy when we have a lot of money. Bowdoin has enormous power, after all, because of its huge endowment, the result of an enormous amount of financial knowledge and power. Because we can do more when we have more, money is an easy way for Bowdoin—and the people in it—to compare its worth against their peers.

There’s something interesting about complex numbers. Unlike the real numbers, the set of complex numbers is not an ordered set. While we all know that 5>2, it doesn’t even make sense to make these kinds of statements about complex numbers. To graph a complex number, you need two axes, and you can see visually that you can’t order all the numbers at once. Without even realizing it, for a long time I took it for granted that numbers had to have order. However, by thinking about i, I could understand how a more complete conception of numbers wouldn’t have an order at all.

As with mathematics, we can have a more complete and satisfying understanding of our roots by discussing the various ideologies that people have. Ignoring people’s beliefs is both counterproductive and dishonest. By accepting other people instead of casting them as religious fanatics, we can understand how our own ideologies (such as capitalism) depend on faith and worship. Maybe we can realize what we’re missing when we’re caught up by the hierarchies and orders that we take for granted.

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