From the issue dated March 28, 2003
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Apart from Pain; an Ethical Retirement; Wealthy WastrelsImages have been reproached for being a way of watching suffering at a distance, as if there were some other way of watching. But watching up close -- without the mediation of an image -- is still just watching.Some of the reproaches made against images of atrocity are not different from characterizations of sight itself. Sight is effortless; sight requires spatial distance; sight can be turned off (we have lids on our eyes, we do not have doors on our ears). The very qualities that made the ancient Greek philosophers consider sight the most excellent, the noblest of the senses are now associated with a deficit. It is felt that there is something morally wrong with the abstract of reality offered by photography; that one has no right to experience the suffering of others at a distance, denuded of its raw power; that we pay too high a human (or moral) price for those hitherto admired qualities of vision -- the standing back from the aggressiveness of the world which frees us for observation and for elective attention. But this is only to describe the function of the mind itself. There's nothing wrong with standing back and thinking. To paraphrase several sages: "Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time." -- Susan Sontag, writer, in Regarding the Pain of Others, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux *** It is one thing to step aside from a tenured position; it is another to consider what one should step into. The wife of a colleague well past retirement age, a man who appears determined never to retire, remarked that my desire to retire early was understandable considering how very hard I have had to work all my life. She concluded that retirement would be a cessation from work, a well-earned rest. She could not know that I read cessation from work as an abhorrent privilege. From my childhood of hunger and poverty I have associated not working with the undeserving rich and perhaps more stringently with deathly boredom, the aimlessness of the unproductive. I hurried to clarify that giving up a tenured position would permit me instead a larger range of choices of productive work. I could continue to teach part-time at the university or for short full-time appointments elsewhere. I would be working on writing more novels, short fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction, the plethora of genres that fill me with greedy pleasure. Official retirement, I explained, would make possible fuller entry into those positions that I had been eyeing for much of my adult life: writer-in-residencies, fellowships at campuses with a diverse set of colleagues and library holdings, and yes, gardener, chef, and homemaker. The last three would not keep me sufficiently busy as to merit the category of occupation, but writer and teacher (rather than tenured faculty member) would. Still, after this encounter, a nagging voice tells me that none of these postretirement choices bears the colors of feminism. The contradiction between desire for luxurious retirement which some older Americans believe is owed them -- golf courses, early bird specials, expensive retirement communities, indulgence in pampered travel, unlimited health care, and so forth -- and the consciousness of social justice still unachieved may be the most pressing ethical issue looming ahead for me and for many baby-boom women professionals facing retirement. The former is eminently achievable for those of us with pension plans and Social Security benefits. But I would like to believe that in unretiring ambition, the desire to remain ideologically close to the present self burns as brightly, and that there can be no retirement from feminist consciousness and work. -- Shirley Geok-lin Lim, professor of English at the University of California at Santa Barbara, in Women Confronting Retirement: a Nontraditional Guide, edited by Nan Bauer-Maglin, academic director of the City University of New York's baccalaureate program at the Graduate Center of CUNY, and Alice Radosh, now retired, and published by Rutgers University Press *** We in the industrialized world tend to see environmental problems through the filter of overpopulation. If we could just slow the growth of tropical nations, then the earth would be safer and the environment more stable. Today's population growth is indeed unprecedented, but this worldview conveniently absolves us of any responsibility, and improving the environment becomes someone else's job. The times are unusual in developed nations as well, and we in the United States are the most unusual, the most "developed" of all. Whether driving our cars, heating our homes, or casually leaving the lights on, we generate a quarter of the world's fossil-fuel emissions with less than 5 percent of its population. As a nation, we spend $50-billion a year on weight loss, about $200 apiece, roughly equivalent to the annual incomes of a billion of the earth's people. That we spend as much money to lose weight as a sixth of the world spends to survive is something we rarely consider because most of us have never known anything else. Without realizing it, we have become the greatest consumers in the history of the planet. -- Rob Jackson, director of Duke University's program of ecology, in The Earth Remains Forever: Generations at a Crossroads, published by University of Texas Press http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 49, Issue 29, Page B4
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Copyright © 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education