Abstract
Dr. Floyd-Thomas’s paper brings nuance to the discussion of pride and the hubris brought by the Westernized Enlightenment across disciplines. As much as I have the impulse to throttle others or shout or spit with the onslaught of mis-truths and ‘alternative facts’, this would not be a wise moment to conclude inquiry as an oral historian, or a Christian ethicist. I ask, can we decolonize ourselves, our syllabi, the canon, and thus our students with grace, understanding, even forgiveness so as not to repeat the trespasses?
Dr. Floyd-Thomas’s paper brings nuance to the discussion of pride and the hubris brought by the Westernized Enlightenment across disciplines. The title of the paper itself demonstrates Dr. Floyd-Thomas’s complex thinking. She begins with the well-recited biblical passage, asking us to meditate on Matt. 6:12-14, or the Lord's prayer, Forgive Us Our Trespasses. Yet in the paper, she vaults us into twenty-first-century cultural terrain. Looking to the title's conclusion takes us backwards to the nineteenth century and the 1813 Jane Austin novel, Pride and Prejudice, in which the female protagonist discovers the repercussions of hasty judgments and comes to appreciate the difference between superficial goodness and actual goodness. From the start, male voices meet female writers.
The text's examination of Holocaust denial brings the current surge of the public reliance on ‘alternative facts’ to the fore. A recent Netflix series, Forgive Us Our Trespasses, explores the Nazi regime's persecution of physically different children and their triumph over oppression and genocide. Yet there are still those who deny the Holocaust despite factual evidence to the contrary. As Dr. Floyd-Thomas discussed the implications, I was struck by her reference to ‘bitter fruit’, which led me to think about the lyrics sung by Billie Holiday in ‘Strange Fruit’. The poem begins, ‘Southern trees bear strange fruit’, and concludes, ‘Here is a strange and bitter crop’. It brings to the fore the intersectionality that joins the oppressed. The anti-lynching poem was written by the Jewish white poet, Abel Meeropol, a member of the communist party who adopted the Rosenbergs’ children after the couple was executed, murdered by the United States government in the midst of the second ‘Red Scare’. Inspired by both Holliday and Meeropol, the modern choreographer and member of the communist party Pearl Primus, a Caribbean American, choreographed a dance work to the poem. Like other choreographers, including Jewish white women, anti-lynching choreographic works served as proof of their communist affiliation for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. During the McCarthy witch hunts, Primus’s passport was taken away, meaning she could not study or work as an anthropologist abroad, which was key to her creative work. The government's ethical twist, which associated anti-lynching with evil communists, allowed the perpetuation of murder through the suppression of protest.
Set in the context of the Holocaust denial, Dr. Floyd-Thomas reminded me of the promotion of a US politician to the government's Education Committee who blamed California wildfires on Jewish space lasers. The rifts on this theme of hatred for the other based on race, class, nation, ethnicity, gender, and gender choices with sci-fi fantasy blaming, not even myth, replacing the historical facts seem endless. As an aghast American, I could bore you with drama. So instead, I will pause to consider the paradox of pride I found manifest in the talk and most compelling as part of a response to the spin-out of Western colonization that I so easily judge.
Dr. Floyd-Thomas points to the outcome of the Cold War's manipulation of Christian ethics to deploy ‘crusades’ for freedom, inspired by a prideful belief in the Western system versus communism. I reflected on government-sponsored advertisement campaigns featuring renditions of a poor Soviet family, fatherless, gathering around a radio broadcasting American news as though starving, with the headline, ‘Give us this day our daily truth’. Like the ‘fatherless’ African American family, analyzed in ‘The Moynihan Report’ as a root cause for unequal socioeconomic conditions in the United States, for the right-wing, this family construction demonstrated failure, Black, Brown, and Soviet. As opposed to communist poverty, with the ‘crusades’ the Americans promised Western ‘freedom’ and ‘the pursuit of happiness’. Dr. Floyd-Thomas explores this convoluted spin on the myth of the American Dream as a valorization of individuality and a fictive great past of empire and colonization, and the deployment of power, soft and hard.
The Bible is filled with powerful examples of the abuses of pride. To quote, it is hubris, unfaithfulness to God, wrongdoing, contempt, arrogance, violence, evil, willfulness, haughtiness, conceit, insolence, drunkenness, false veneration of jewelry and idols, impatience, includes the perils of nationalism, deception, it is insulting and mocking, it demonstrates stubbornness, wrongdoing, and evil. Proverbs 16:18 reminds us, ‘Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall’. Perhaps we can even look at the current day and hope that pride will bring a fall. But do we dare hope that from suffering comes a rebirth: In his prophecy against Babylon, Isaiah says (13:11), ‘I will punish the world for its evil, the wicked for their sins. I will put an end to the arrogance of the haughty and will humble the pride of the ruthless.’
However, as we speak about decolonization as redemptive during this conference, can we make this turn as we examine pride? The paradoxes of Christian thought are riveting, Christ's words brimming with them, and with Christ's suffering comes redemption for people of the earth. Looking to pride specifically, Proverbs says (29:23), ‘Pride brings a person low, but the lowly in spirit gain honour’.
As I respond with the possibilities of a turn, like our speaker, I recalled my own early training. My first work was in finance in the 1980s, and later I worked as a mother of three girls. In the 1970s and 80s, the United States car industry fell into disrepair with the corresponding rise of the Japanese ‘golden age’ of automobile manufacturing. This turn led me to study with W. Edwards Deming, an expert in quality control. His mantra of making products that last and do not need to be replaced speaks to our quest for sustainability in the face of the disposable, and even products with batteries that are built to fail over time. Rather than toss a car, a couch, a sweater, and now a mobile phone, he believed goods should be built to last and even to be passed on. Spurned by US manufacturers for his antithetical approach that emphasized cooperation and condemned price competition, he turned the Japanese market under the guiding principle of ‘Pride in workmanship’. What of this pride?
Second, as a mother who has raised a woman who has married a woman, I have come to understand the LGBTQ movement that champions what my daughter calls ‘Pride’ in events and showings of solidarity. The Gay Pride movement has been inspired by and inspires numerous other groups that find themselves marginalized. What of this pride?
As theologians of Christian ethics, can we find pride in the Bible to inspire, as secular movements have? Proverbs 17:6 can be translated, ‘Children's children are a crown to the aged, and parents are the pride of their children’. Here, the word pride is also translated as ‘glory’. Isaiah 60:15 also uses pride in the generational context, indicating that one feels this type of pride in what is built, hand-to-hand, elder to younger.
Like Deming and activists, the flipside of the evils of biblical pride can be found ‘in’ works, good works by implication. Isaiah 4:2 can read, ‘In that day the Branch of the Lord will be beautiful and glorious, and the fruit of the land will be the pride and glory of the survivors in Israel’. Other translations of pride also understand the pride IN the land as excellent, lovely, and glorious as a manifestation of God's creative powers. In 2 Corinthians 7:4 Paul says to the church, ‘I have spoken to you with great frankness; I take great pride in you. I am greatly encouraged; in all our troubles my joy knows no bounds’. Pride here is also found as comfort, joy, consolation, encouragement, particularly in the face of adversity. Paul finds pride IN the people; Deming used that pride to inspire economic and systemic change. Other examples can be found in 2 Cor. 8:24, and Gal. 6:4.
So, I turn to the paradox of pride, and then back to the Lord's prayer, ‘Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us’. Again, I am struck by the implication of circularity, ‘For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you’.
As Dr. Floyd-Thomas’s talk suggests, the manipulation of the historical event, the shameless corrosion of story and even myth, leads to prideful announcements, the Proud Boys, and the pride that we may all hope goes before the fall. Through our works, through our pride in workmanship generationally, and a spirit of forgiveness without the acceptance of the mockeries of historical events, perhaps there we can find the turn that will take us from theory to practice, as this talk demands, and as discussed yesterday evening. In layman's terms, we can ask, ‘But what
I turn now to a review of teaching practices, and then my work as a historian.
A neurologist, who has found himself and his department teaching under the scrutiny of the Florida legislature for teaching Diversity and Inclusion when looking at models and datasets, provides inspiration. Apparently, the exploration of the composition of the members of a study and pointing out the problematic of the normative use of white male subjects to generalize about the population, writ large, was not appreciated. The legislature's oversight of Diversity and Inclusion inspired a demand for emails and phone texts from professors in his department. He recalled a departmental meeting, and another story of how fascism works, seeping in. Professors responded, ‘I’ve done nothing wrong. Why not?’ The neurologist objected, was met with silence from others inside the monitored meeting room, and then noted the outrage and chatter outside in the hallway, the space not monitored by the legislature.
I recalled my own teaching in Budapest for a university that has fallen under Victor Orban and his government. Although my two classes in Cold War culture and women in the Cold War, called ‘Women as Weapons’, were approved by the department, with the specter of COVID and the monitoring of courses as recorded lectures, the class on women and gender was cancelled. Indeed, women, gender, and LGBTQ are not allowed to be taught at Orban's universities. Invited back, I was assured a healthy salary, particularly for one who adjuncts in the United States. I was even offered a good living wage, an office with a window, research funds, and a parking spot. But, I noted, I cannot teach my course. Yes, I was assured. ‘But you can teach anything else that you want’. Like handing over our personal data, ‘Why not?’ rang loud as the slow bleed to fascism. When the offer was repeated to a conference of international PhD students, I was aghast. For them, it was a paying job. Why not?
As professors and teachers were confronted with trying to get to the analytical truth, the neurologist and I discussed the specter of Artificial Intelligence: how can we as members of the academy assure truth in authorship? The paradox of honesty is manifest: If a student uses AI to correct and perfect an essay that he/she/they have written, an AI detection system will identify the essay as written by AI, even if initially written by a student with original ideas. Our Turnitin and Grammarly checks for plagiarism look like buggy whips in the face of Tesla's self-driving cars. And, upon historical reflection, how do we confront the myth of the sole author in the face of the collaboration of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound? At present, is the student's Pound to be found in AI? In addition, we, as scholars, are reliant on the peer review process. How many of us have not learned from our editors or bemoaned the death of the editor in academic publishing? We acknowledge our heritage and academic support in footnotes. Yet in the classroom, buggy-whip solutions abound: blue books and pens, baseline tests and pencil-written essays, interviews, more, more, more oversight in the ultimate drive to verify the student as sole author.
The Florida neurologist has found a solution: he has advocated for zero monitoring of AI assistance, while demanding rigorous footnotes to cite the work of other humans and AI, when and if used. With no faithful tools to evaluate original work except instinct, which cannot be brought before a court of peers as evidence, he throws it back to his students. He tells them to write essays and lab reports only after asking themselves, ‘Why am I here?’ He demands that the students recognize their personal motivation when using learning and expressive strategies as they produce work that, in theory, will bring a greater understanding of the human brain, thus breeding and instilling humanity with this process. Perhaps his reliance on and faith in the ultimate good of a student can be questioned just as Christian ethicists question Original Sin, but I find his approach to ‘pride in workmanship’ to be a compelling start. In my classes, I tell students that they can get an A or Distinction if they tell me something I don’t know. This also demands original thought. Perhaps there is a small step forward possible using these techniques in an educational setting to get to truths.
As a historian, in my practice of oral history analysis, the misstatement, the mis-remembered, and even the lie is a vital point of contact with the narrator. While I, as taker of testimony, am apt to correct or take offense at the non-truth, this, for the oral historian, is a fundamental misstep. As much as I have the impulse to throttle others or shout or spit with the onslaught of mis-truths and ‘alternative facts’, this would not be a wise moment to conclude inquiry as an oral historian, or a Christian ethicist.
Alessandro Portelli's The Order Has Been Carried Out: History, Memory, and Meaning of a Nazi Massacre in Rome 1 examines the fact that an entire population mis-remembered the precursor to a mass execution for which blame and causality were assigned and re-assigned. As remembered, falsely, the actual events were largely hidden under layers of constant telling and retelling over time. Through his compassion for those who recall a fabrication, in the face of mis-truth, Portelli digs into a new humanity by understanding the nature, the texture of the fabrication. Why and how has the series of alternative facts been used to serve the population? In this ‘remembering’ in the face of Nazi atrocities, what can this tell us about them? About us? Portelli poses a challenge to us, even when confronted by the absurdity of space lasers and a pretend Auschwitz or school shootings as hoaxes. What can these almost unbearable fabrications take us in understanding the ‘other’? In this sickening empathy, can we find a way to reverse their fabrications? So, I ask, can we decolonize ourselves, our syllabi, the canon, and thus our students with grace, understanding, even forgiveness so as not to repeat the trespasses?
