David by Michelangelo. Photo by Jörg Bittner Unna
I read an essay recently concerning the state of climate change and global warming. The first sentence was a quote: “I don’t know how to be human anymore.” The context of the quote had to do with how difficult it is these days to live a life that can make a difference; a life with purpose. The cry resonated with me, and I find myself echoing it: I don’t know how to be human anymore.
I am that most loathed of modern-day species: a straight, white, upper-middle-class male who was educated in the traditions of European/Western culture. Although I am one-half Puerto Rican (my entire maternal side), I do not look at all Hispanic, having received all the recessive genes of my Irish father. Nor am I completely in tune with Latin culture: I speak some Spanish, but not fluently; I enjoy salsa music; and Boricuan cuisine is always a joy to consume (my grandmother ran a restaurant for many years and was known as a superb cook). But I have little to no daily contact with Latin culture. My mother, in fact, was someone who was dying to escape the machismo attitudes of all the Hispanic men she knew, and she did so by marrying my father and making every attempt to raise her sons (6) as far from that culture as possible.
My humanity is pretty much wrapped up in Western intellectual traditions. I went to an all-male Catholic college prep high school in the late 60s (not Jesuit), in which the student body were all in the 95th percentile of intelligence as measured by standardized testing. I studied Latin for four years, translating six of the twelve books of Virgil’s Aeneid in my senior year. I took courses in philosophy and theology. I read books such as Moby Dick, Too Late the Phalarope, Catcher in the Rye, Portnoy’s Complaint and John Dos Passos’ trilogy USA (I didn’t understand it then. It was a slog for a 16-year-old). I knew the classics of Greek and Roman philosophy and mythology. I was highly fluent in French by junior year (it has, alas, abandoned me. Curiously, Spanish was not offered as a language). I learned about existentialism in classes that discussed the works of Sartre, Camus, and Teillard de Chardin. This was my high school education, which also included the traditional math and science courses (although I never took calculus), and a smattering of Japanese.
College was not as dense intellectually, but I did major in English and Theatre. My course of study pretty much revolved around American and British literature, as well as the canon of western dramatic literature. I especially took to Irish writers such as Joyce, Yeats, Synge, and O’Casey. I was taken with French existentialist playwrights such as Genet, Ionesco, Beckett and, again, Sartre. Classic American playwrights also were on that list: Williams, Miller, Hellman, Wilder, Odetts, O’Neill, Anderson. Wilson, Shepard and Albee were up-and-coming. Shakespeare was a dominant influence. I also had a yen for the great musicals of the 50s and 60s: Rogers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Lowe, Loesser, Kern, Rogers and Hart, Wilson. Stephen Sondheim was up-and-coming. I thought that West Side Story had somehow been written about my parents, only “Maria” and “Tony” both survived and went on to have me, my brothers, and an American-dream suburban life.
I went on to spend 42 years in education, teaching at the high school and college level. I also had a career as a part-time actor. All my acting work has been highly traditional, based on Stanislavski technique. I taught acting and directing, mostly within the western realistic tradition, with nods to techniques developed by Brecht, Boal and Grotowski.
The point of all this is to establish the fact that I am a card-carrying member of the white male patriarchy. Today, that’s the worst kind of person to be. It’s nothing I signed up for nor actively chose. I was more or less guided along that path by others. Nonetheless, I am, by association, guilty of a whole host of crimes against humanity. Everything that is wrong with the world is our (my) fault. We enslaved other humans. We colonized the third world without offering it equality. We’ve repressed numerous other cultures and continue to oppress minorities, women, people of color, the non-cisgendered. We’ve captured most of the world’s wealth for ourselves (we invented capitalism, after all) and continue to keep a stranglehold on first world politics. Everyone who feels dis-empowered makes us the target of their resistance.
Do I blame them? Not at all. After all, most of their accusations are accurate. Western European patriarchy has had a pretty good run, and perhaps it’s time for it to dissolve. However, the difficulty at the individual level, the level of my personal humanity, is that while I can certainly acknowledge the evils committed by western European culture, I do not feel personally responsible for what has developed. I’m not the oppressive type. And what I fear is that we are throwing the baby out with the bathwater, in the sense that while we are now recognizing the wrongs done by patriarchal European culture over the years, we also appear very willing to ignore and discount the beauty, the intellectual achievements, and the humanity created by Western culture.
I’m not here to fight for any return to the past. I’m more than willing to let history and events take their course. There will inevitably be tradeoffs involved, as society continues to attempt to redress whatever evils, real or imagined, it finds or creates. Nothing comes free, and there are always unintended consequences. It’s just that, on the personal level, I wonder where a bona fide straight white male fits in a society bent on re-shaping its cultural norms beyond a white, male, patriarchal dominance. The identity politics of today simply do not mesh with me, as I find them divisive rather than unifying. I would prefer to find a humanity politics, a sense of all cultures finding the humanity that is in all of us within their particular cultural circumstances.
Or, perhaps, build a nice hermitage for myself. -twl