The opening chapter of V. V. Ganeshananthan’s 2023 novel Brotherless Night introduces a “stern, balding zoology teacher” and talented anatomist named Rajan Master whose students, including the story’s narrator, Sashi, simply call “Sir.” “He spoke often and with fondness about those he had taught,“ she recalls, „many of whom had gone on to become prominent physicians.” Sashi soon credits her own medical school admission to Sir, and later in the novel she grieves his premature death. “Sir had cut doors in the body and invited us in,” she remembers. “Look how beautiful the living, Sashi, he had said. Look at how marvelous.”
Brotherless Night is the second book I have read recently about the Sri Lankan civil war, the first being The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka, which is narrated not by a student but by a ghost. Both texts treat unflinchingly of violence in a society suddenly pervaded by it: nationalistic violence, interethnic violence, intraethnic violence, terroristic violence, opportunistic violence, violence between generations, violence within families, violence among friends, violence against the self. I have been confronted this year with these and other exceptional novels born of violent worlds (1990s Turkey in Orhan Pamuk’s Snow, 1980s Libya in Hisham Matar’s My Friends, 1920s Mexico in Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory), and through them I have been reminded how shamelessly we in the United States—in a society that is, by any reasonable comparison, secure and peaceful—nevertheless trade in the vocabulary of violence. “We live in a dark house full of war,” the American writer Michael Robbins catastrophized in the December 2022 issue of Harper’s Magazine, citing “climate disaster, economic collapse, war, resurgent fascism and nationalism, mass violence”—a litany of hyperboles—as his ostensible proofs. In reflecting on the protracted run-up to this week’s Election Day and our subsequent preoccupation with its outcomes, I would suggest, respectfully (and I do respect Mr. Robbins, who is a very gifted poet), that we become more sober in our discourse. Calling a problem a calamity, and its skeptic a villain, brings neither us nor our children any nearer to its solution.
Our Mission at MICDS demands that we resist temptations both to sensationalize and to demonize. “The next generation must include those who think critically.” To begin with the end already presumed (“I’m right, and I will find the facts to prove it”) is to think not critically but circularly—indeed, is not to think at all—and to proceed from presumption to embellishment only further confounds reason. The election itself, independent of the political questions and choices entailed, offers a case in point. From the left, voices assure us with scant evidence and in exaggerated terms that the result was “a wholesale repudiation of the Democratic message” and “an abject disaster.” From the right, not to be outdone, voices assure us that it represents “an unprecedented and powerful mandate.” History, however, argues otherwise.
A review of gubernatorial, congressional, and presidential election results over the last one hundred years—averaged and weighted to account for changing Electoral College allocations—reveals that this week’s results were neither a “disaster” nor a “mandate,” but were rather merely an extension of sub-supermajority support for both major parties that has unfortunately characterized American politics almost without exception since the late 1980s. Consider by contrast the annual average of 74% of state and federal executive and legislative offices won or held by Democrats during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency; or the 60% won or held by Republicans during Eisenhower’s first term; or the 66% won or held by Democrats during Kennedy’s and Johnson’s presidencies; or the 61% won or held by Republicans during Reagan’s presidency. Since 1989, however, Republicans have only won or held 53% of state and federal executive and legislative offices on average during Republican presidencies; and the figure is identical for Democrats during Democratic presidencies.
Within the context of this sustained political stalemate, in which ideas and ideals—and the political leaders who express and embody them—only rarely attract supermajority support, it is all the more essential at MICDS that we cultivate habits of curiosity, objective inquiry, and truth-seeking in our students, across all of our curricular programming, as they grow into adulthood and informed citizenship. “The next generation must include those who think critically.”
Within this same context of national political struggle and striving (the phrase “wrestling since Reagan” appears in my notes for this letter from earlier in the week—and maybe I should have left it there?), I would also stress the importance of another requirement of our Mission: “to meet the challenges of this world with confidence and embrace all its people with compassion.” I suspect that compassion is easier to come by under supermajority conditions, in times of consensus political alignment and a prevailing sense of unity and collective purpose, than it is today. Under simple-majority conditions like ours, selfishness too often prevails instead, and all too readily. The demagogic politician Willie Stark in Robert Penn Warren’s novel All the King’s Men describes the law as “like a single-bed blanket on a double bed and three folks in the bed and a cold night.” We must teach our students to defy such cynical and defeatist understandings of society. A single-bed blanket on a double bed presents a choice: fight over it, or learn to knit. At MICDS, we are learning to knit.
During the fourth season of the television series Succession, a character who saw the world much the same way as Willie Stark—and who amassed power and wealth to himself in much the same way—is denounced for having “drawn in the edges of the world” and “closed men’s hearts” in so doing, for having made “but a mean estimation of the world” and feeding “a certain kind of meagerness in men.” We must forever make a hopeful estimation of the world at our uplifting school, and feed not the meagerness but the generosity in our students’ hearts to embrace all the world’s people with compassion. Ganeshananthan’s science teacher, Sir, who pays for his love with his life in Brotherless Night, nevertheless sees every human being as a miracle: “Look how beautiful the living. Look at how marvelous.” We would all do well to see as he does.
Always reason, always compassion, always courage. Have a wonderful weekend.
Jay Rainey
Head of School
This week’s addition to the “Refrains for Rams” playlist: Good Luck, Babe! by Missouri native Chappell Roan (Apple Music / Spotify)