Early last Saturday morning, as Homecoming Weekend Fun Run enthusiasts mustered over coffee in Founders’ Court, I was introduced to a prospective student by her mother. After the child told me her name, I asked, “Do you spell it with a ‘C’ or a ‘K’?” “‘Catherine’ with a ‘C,’” she said. “What a ‘Great’ name!” I declared. The joke was a dud. Children compelled to speak at sunrise with persons five times their age are to be forgiven for ignoring 18th-century Russian monarch puns.
As it happens, we have two Catherines and three Katherines enrolled this year—and I can attest that all five are indeed great, if not technically ‘Great,’ our nation being a democracy and such. If we include the diminutive forms of these names, we can count seven more: one great Cate and six great Kates. Attention to spelling is a must at MICDS. We have an Aarya, an Aria, and an Arya, an Annabel and an Annabelle, and an Ariana, an Arianna, and an Arriana. We number four Audreys and one Audri, three Caitlins, one Kaetlyn, and one Kaitlyn, six Claires and one Clare, two Colins and one Collin, four Elliots and two Elliotts, and three Elises and one Elyse among our students—and, as you will notice, except for a smattering of “K” names, this only gets us as far as “E” in the alphabet. I’m afraid you would be stuck with me a while if I took inventory all the way to the two Zachs and one Zak in our ranks, so I will stop here. Suffice it to say, though, that homophonic names abound on our campus.
Everyone has a name, and everyone has a story. When I was in college, I was fortunate to be taught by Arno Mayer, a historian of modern Europe who died this past December at the age of 97. Unlike scholars who attributed World War I and its 20th-century aftermaths to political failures between nations—to imperial rivalries and disastrous alliances—Mayer contended that political failures within nations better explained Europe’s calamities. “When the examination of the causes and objectives of war centers on decision making in one of the belligerent countries,” he proposed, “the analytic and explicative weight falls on its domestic and political rather than on its external and diplomatic life.” It was not global imperialism so much as “internal revolutionary forces”—public outrage at unchecked capitalism and enduring feudalism—“that pushed the elites of individual states into World War I as a kind of pressure valve for the release of domestic tensions” according to Mathias Fuelling’s recent summary of Mayer’s intellectual legacy; and it was simultaneous industrial and technological progress that produced the conflict’s catastrophic impact. In short, Mayer asserted that the coincidence of these two phenomena—political stagnation and technological advancement—precipitated the self-destruction of our species on a scale previously inconceivable. “The blood-dimmed tide is loosed,” the Irish poet William Butler Yeats would write shortly after the Great War’s end, “and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned…. / Surely the Second Coming is at hand.”
Do we encounter a similar coincidence of political stagnation and technological advancement in our world today? One could argue that we do—that the miraculous communication networks now connecting us are too often purposed for shouting at and over one another—yet one could argue, too, that our present distemper is not a relapse but a chronic condition whose onset predates even World War I. “We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new,” quipped Henry David Thoreau in 1854, “but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.” Peering back further, to around 1610, we find Shakespeare’s Caliban protesting in The Tempest, “You taught me language; and my profit on’t / Is, I know how to curse.”
The evolution of our technologies through the last several hundred years—our language, our telegraph cables, our weapons of war, our wireless communications—has accelerated steadily and exponentially, but the evolution of our social and political behavior would appear to be dragging its feet. I have heard all my life that people only use 10% of their brain. What does Google Gemini have to say? “No, humans do not only use 10% of their brain.” Well that’s a relief! But am I alone in thinking that, by asking an AI whether I only use 10% of my brain, I am proving that I do, in fact, only use 10% of my brain? Quod erat demonstrandum, Google Gemini! (Now please tell me: who was Princess Adelaide, and did she ever get better from that whooping cough?)
Respecting the suspicion that our politics did indeed mature after the 20th century’s upheavals but have since regressed (“We are now more divided than ever!” shout our miraculous communication networks), I do not insist that this isn’t the case; but it’s worth noting, too, that over six decades ago, in the 1960 presidential election, John F. Kennedy’s share of the popular vote exceeded Richard Nixon’s by only 17 hundredths of a percentage point. In fact, only three of the last 16 presidential contests have found one major-party candidate’s popularity exceeding the other’s by more than 10 percentage points, and no candidate has enjoyed such a margin since 1984. “Yes, this is a presidential year like no other,” contended John Podhoretz in the September issue of Commentary, but “nearly every presidential race [is] the most unprecedented in American history up to that moment,” and therefore “we should expect…that all presidential elections will be,” as he puts it, “bananas.”
With all due respect for their potassium content, we are decidedly anti-bananas at MICDS this election year. We are pro-technological maturity and pro-political maturity alike, as off-pattern for our species as this coincidence may be. Our phones and earbuds are stowed away, and our eyes and ears are open to each other on campus every day. We may not always agree, but we must always strive to listen and to see. I have shared with you before (twice, in fact) my affection for the wisdom of Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek: “An enemy is someone whose story you have not heard.” Political immaturity anonymizes, dehumanizes, and, in its most pernicious expressions, demonizes the “enemy.” (Look no further than your mailboxes and TV screens this fall for cases in point.) Political maturity, by contrast, listens, hears, and, in its most constructive expressions, dignifies and even compromises. It recognizes opponents, but it does not imagine enemies. Everyone has a name, and everyone has a story. “Do you spell it with a ‘C’ or a ‘K’?” is both a question and an invitation—“the ceremony of innocence” for which Yeats might have longed. It is the place where a new story can begin.
Always reason, always compassion, always courage. My best wishes to you and your families for a wonderful weekend.
Jay Rainey
Head of School
This week’s addition to the “Refrains for Rams” playlist: I Got a Name by Jim Croce (Apple Music / Spotify).