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Pamela J. Stubbart
philosophy, education, knowledge work?
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Info
- Philosopher, Educator, and Entrepreneur.Writing and Editing | Greater New York City Area, USSummary
I'm an independent educator, philosopher, knowledge worker, and entrepreneur.
Experience- Sept 2012 - PresentK-12 Education Program Officer / Institute for Humane Studies
I serve as an advisor to young classical liberals who are interested in K-12 education careers, and I develop content + programs geared towards them.
- Jan 2012 - PresentSolopreneur in Chief / Cognitive Catering, LLC
I'm an oddball solopreneur.
Through my business, I primarily offer freelance knowledge work services (e.g., research, white paper ghostwriting, etc.) and what could best be described as "philosophical consultation."
- Oct 2010 - PresentBabysitter Extraordinaire / Metropolitan Sitters LLC
I babysit (both occasionally and on an ongoing basis) for various Manhattan families.
I aim to engage children of all ages intellectually during our time together.
- Feb 2012 - Dec 2012Education Blogger / The Huffington Post
I occasionally contributed to the Education column of the popular news site The Huffington Post.
- Jul 2011 - Jan 2012Commentary Page Coordinator, Teachers College Record / Teachers College, Columbia University
I invited education researchers and practitioners to write short opinion pieces for the Teachers College Record, then fulfilled the demands of our editorial calendar by managing the submission process, preparing the pieces for online publication, and publishing them using a content management system.
I also completed first-round internal reviews of manuscripts submitted to the Record as potential feature articles.
- Aug 2010 - Dec 2011Outreach Fellow / Columbia University Philosophy Outreach
I supported the Columbia Secondary School in its implementation of an ambitious pre-college philosophy curriculum by teaching Introductory Philosophy and Bioethics to 7th and 8th graders.
- Oct 2010 - Jun 2011Services Desk Assistant / Gottesman Libraries, Teachers College, Columbia University
I provided excellent customer service to library patrons, completed a digital archiving project, and regularly contributed to the library's blog.
- Jan 2010 - Jul 2010Adjunct Instructor of Philosophy / Yavapai College
I taught philosophy both conventionally and online. Courses included Critical Thinking and Ethical Issues in Health Care.
- Aug 2007 - May 2010Teaching Assistant / Arizona State University
I assisted with courses including Introduction to Philosophy, Introduction to Ethics, and Applied Ethics. I also taught independently, including Introduction to Philosophy and Introduction to Ethics, both conventionally and online.
- Nov 2005 - Aug 2007Legal Assistant / Siavage Law Group
I supported an office of several lawyers by completing administrative tasks and various special projects as assigned.
- Aug 2006 - May 2007Peer Mentor & Supplemental Instructor / Georgia State University
I helped students to earn better grades in introductory philosophy by holding weekly office hours and study sessions.
Education-
2010 - 2011Teachers College, Columbia UniversityPhilosophy and Education (Doctoral coursework)
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2007 - 2010Arizona State UniversityPhilosophy (Doctoral coursework)
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2005 - 2007Georgia State UniversityBA in Philosophy (Magna cum laude with departmental distinction)
Additional Information-
Websites:
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Honors:General Research Fellowship, Teachers College - Columbia University, 2010-2011 Weinberg Fellowship, Teachers College - Columbia University, 2010-2011 Humane Studies Fellowship, Institute for Humane Studies, 2010-2012 George W. Beiswanger Award (Best Undergraduate Philosophy Major), Georgia State University, 2007 Troy Moore Undergraduate Ethics Essay Contest, First Place, Georgia State University, 2007
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Interests:Education, ethics, philosophy, economics, politics, current events, psychology, economics, technology, nutrition, animal welfare.
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Tweets
- @charliearchy me neither. idk.
- Almond milk from the carton: not sure if hipster or redneck. http://t.co/Em0JXQLhpx
- RT @lvanderkam: Would like to "anti-highlight" in Kindle. Annoyed that 298 readers highlighted an inane comment in something i'm reading...Jun 18, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- I suspect that Bloomberg is behind all these soda fountains with too low of a brix.
- @JaredCurrier nope.
- @pencil_skirts I find your taste in consumables impeccable.
- I came to Taco Bell for hangover food and a drunk guy from the bar next door came in to vomit loudly in the bathroom. Fml.
- RT @lisamariebasile: Lovely @amelapay @enbrown @myhairisblue and me! Being all sassy and what not . http://t.co/7SNgHfHVAqJun 18, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- When i was 11 i gave a girl i liked my holographic Charizard. She gave it to a boy she liked.I fucking snapped inside http://t.co/JuuVtqSc8PJun 18, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- RT @TaylorLorenz: Confidential Administration Document Details Plan To Sell Obamacare Through Social Media http://t.co/VAEKB7F0AVJun 18, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- Google Hangouts > meatspace meetings.Jun 18, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- Private sector "nudge." http://t.co/mS55tWb1n8Jun 18, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- Most annoying thing I've read so far this week. What's so male about texting? And stupid men-are-socially-inept spin. http://t.co/wlb4lt7PPKJun 18, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- I am declining in my own mind; . http://t.co/WV1Sc2OSM2
- Last round face. I got a spare! @ Chelsea Piers Sports Center http://t.co/ukGWXu0E91
- Nachos are the best thing. I just got guacamole in a bowling ball.
- Just ordered something called Lemon Berry Swagger? Duckface. @ Chelsea Piers Sports Center http://t.co/qDAQHN5bqJ
- Just ordered something called Lemon Berry Swagger?
- YOU REFLECT ME I LOVE THAT ABOUT YOU.
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Posts
- Jun 01, 13
Last week would have marked my 4th wedding anniversary, had we not divorced. Actually, I suppose it’s still the 4th anniversary of the wedding, although people tend not to celebrate those occasions after they split up, for obvious reasons.
On May 22nd, 2009, I married my college boyfriend. I was 23 at the time. It was a Friday. The wedding was teeny tiny (8 guests, all family). We made it to our 1st anniversary, in 2010, but separated shortly thereafter. The divorce took the best part of a year due to jurisdictional issues, because we both had moved out of the state of the “marital domicile,” but it was a fairly uncomplicated process.
I want to emphasize at the outset that my ex-husband is one of the best human beings I have ever met, and I do not regret the time that we spent together in the least. Neither will I divulge any personal details of the marriage. But I have long wanted to say something about it.
In retrospect, I basically believed on some subconscious level that getting married would fix the biggest, recurring problem in our relationship. If this had been made explicit to me, I would have realized that that was not a good motivation and unlikely to work, but it was a belief lurking beneath the surface of my mind, so I didn’t figure it out until later.
Beforehand, I had a few misgivings about the institution of marriage itself, and felt ambivalent about changing my last name. I didn’t really internalize the desire to get married, and wished I were the kind of person who felt no such desire. I didn’t like that gay people couldn’t legally marry, and the unfairness of it all. But apparently these concerns were not serious enough to keep me from going through with the marriage (and name change) anyways.
Almost immediately after marrying, I realized that marriage was mostly a signal to the rest of the world about our relationship, rather than constituting any sort of drastically new agreement between us. And respond to that signal it did. My parents treated me different, strangers treated me differently, dentists and doctors and bankers and everyone treated me somewhat differently.
The change was both empowering and bewildering. As a Married Woman, you are definitely a real adult — but a real adult who is constantly and significantly beholden to another. Before the wedding, you are still a child. Immediately after, you are a wife. I am only now, in my years as a Divorced Woman, finally enjoying real adulthood on its own terms.
Maybe you want to have an “egalitarian” marriage, maybe you don’t plan to have kids, maybe you’ve married for happiness and self-actualization instead of out of economic complementarity. Nonetheless, you as an individual and you as a couple face barriers as to how conservatively or liberally you want to understand your marital bond. Some of these barriers are internalized, some of them are in the minds of the people around you.
The institution of marriage can and does change over time, but those changes emerge from many marriages taking place at the same time as other sociocultural shifts. You can’t do much to stop that kind of change, but neither can you do too much to accelerate it.
I’m giving myself a break for having been born into a world where marriage is viewed more in terms of pleasure and convenience than as a sacred and unconditional bond. And I’m giving myself a break for having gotten divorced amidst some alleged divorce epidemic that’s threatening the foundations of society, thereby contributing to it. It’s not my fault and not my problem.
I’d been halfway feeling like writing something about the marriage experience for over a year now, but didn’t have any grand conclusion in mind. Having put this stuff down, I still don’t have any grand conclusion. I don’t have any fantastic advice to people thinking of marrying or thinking of divorcing, either.
If you do get married, secularly married, realize that you’re first and foremost expressing something about your relationship to the rest of society that’s only partially under your control. But if you decline to get married — especially if you’re in a long-term relationship — you’re publicly expressing something too, because marriage is such a popular and deeply rooted institution to have opted out of.
Would I get married again? Maybe. I don’t feel like it’s a crazy thing to do, even now. I know that my troubles were partially in virtue of having married the wrong person.
But most days, I feel like the marriage experience has turned me into the person I wanted to be in the first place, years ago when I was struggling with the foreign-feeling desire to marry: Someone who values close relationships and appropriate commitments but who feels no particular need to formalize that in the eyes of the bureaucracy and in the eyes of her fellows.
- May 21, 13
Frankly I have mixed feelings about Gretchen Rubin’s Happiness Project. Although it’s a satisfactory entry point into what you could call applied positive psychology, I find that I actively dislike many of her “Moment of Happiness” quotes of the day (still can’t bring myself to unsubscribe from the emails though because at least they are some food for thought?) And I am so deeply skeptical of devoting so much time and attention to the explicit goal of becoming happy, per se.
But there is one real gem of a tip buried in her corpus that has the potential to be a real game changer for me, and maybe for you too. Rubin calls this happiness commandment “spending out.” It’s a little difficult to describe explicitly, and explained through examples. I really fully understood one of Rubin’s non-spending-out traps as soon as she mentioned it: re-using razor blades way too many times. Some more of my non-spending-out weaknesses: splurging on decent clothes and hair products and makeup but never using them because my life is kinda casual, allowing clean sheets to sit in the drawer while the ones on my bed become downright grimy, filling Evernote and spiral notebooks and everywhere else with zillions of writing ideas and then never writing a damn thing.
Spending out is more of an attitude adjustment than a behavior. I don’t like this word because it’s pretty woo-woo but when you spend out, you move in the world with an “abundance” mindset. Rather than assuming, on some level, that shit is scarce and you have to conserve, conserve, conserve, spending out is a behavior predicated on the belief (however firmly or tenuously you hold it at present) that your life is, and will continue to be, full of goodness.
When it comes to razor blades or hair product or whatever, there’s just no good reason to act as if these things are in short supply, even if your animal brain is nudging you in that direction. You are a competent adult committed to adding value to the world and receiving value in return, and that is likely to be sufficient to fund ample razor blade purchases in the future.
And when it comes to ideas, hoarding them is actually counterproductive. When you put ideas down, work them out, and let them mingle, you end up with many more and better ideas than that with which you started, and more motivation too.
I quit grad school over a year and a half ago. Spent most of the first year reading books and blogs about entrepreneurial stuff and being underemployed at a dead-end job that still left me accruing debt and exhausted besides. I thought that I couldn’t and shouldn’t start spending out, with ideas especially, until after I clawed my way into a significantly less precarious professional and financial situation.
Now, I believe that the spending out must come first. Humans don’t do well, energetically and creatively and productivity-wise, when we’re operating from a place of stress and worry. Even just physiologically, the cards are stacked against your mind then, you know… cortisol and whatever. You may not be able to just flat-out decide to be less scarcity-minded. But spending out as much as you can, every day, doesn’t require a blind faith in the universe’s magical abundance. Rather, it’ll actually become a proximate cause of creating a stimulating flow of stuff (and ideas, and activities, and people) through your life.
- Mar 15, 12
Last week, I devoured Reid Hoffman & Ben Casnocha’s brand new book, “The Start-up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform your Career.” It couldn’t have come out at a more appropriate time for me personally, given that I have abandoned academic aspirations, left grad school, quit a boring publishing job, and launched a tutoring service, all in the last six months.
“The Start-up of You” is pretty good; it contains lots of relevant anecdotes and reads easily as it inspires. I expect that it’s largely preaching to the choir, though: while readers may not have previously had a worked-out theory of conducting one’s career like a start-up, they are likely those who were already mostly convinced of the value of continuous professional and personal self-improvement.
Its main messages are fairly simple and somewhat repetitive: The work world will continue to change rapidly whether you like it or not, constantly invest in yourself, constantly invest in your social network, reassess your level of risk aversiveness by thinking clearly about what’s at stake in pursuing new opportunities and which possible fallback options are available to you.
Above all, though, I think the most important takeaway of the book consists in one simple but powerful insight — that “adaptability creates stability.”
A person might think that she can create and preserve stability in her finances, family life, retirement situation, etc. by committing to a particular job or line of work. However, the times they are a-changin’, in ways that often make this kind of commitment imprudent. Teachers and other government employees thought that they were pursuing stability in their seniority-based career ladders, but public indebtedness threatens their pensions. Doctorate holders earned their PhDs partially in the expectation that decent academic employment would later become available to them, but the adjunctivization of academia continues at a rapid clip. My father as a young man forwent college and put his nose to the grindstone at IBM, even relocating a family for them, only to have his division sold off (and his friends laid off) countless times over the past 15 years. Of the many people put in these and similar positions, some swim by actively developing new skills and finding new outlets for the old ones, while others sink by crossing their fingers and hoping things will just work out somehow.
As such, the cardinal virtues for navigating the turbulent waters of globalization, rapid and radical technological development, and uncertain political climate aren’t loyalty and commitment at all, but adaptability, flexibility, and openness to opportunity and change.
“The Start-up of You” is about work. But adaptability and openness to change are qualities that serve humans well across the board, because work is not the only sphere of our lives that we find constantly in flux. Our work lives both contribute to and reflect a wide variety of other conditions: communication tools, living arrangements, transportation systems, family structure, leisure activities, agricultural practices, etc etc etc.
There is a book that discusses change very broadly, and the advantages of adapting to it. This book is Virginia Postrel’s “The Future and Its Enemies” (1998). I read it last July and haven’t been able to stop thinking through its (*cringe*) life-changing lens ever since.
Postrel clearly establishes and discusses in various contexts the important distinction between “statisists” (as in “stasis”) and “dynamists.” A statisist resists the future and seeks to preserve features of the present with ill effects, either out of a misguided desire for stability (this characterizes reactionaries, usually politically conservative) or a desire for control (this characterizes technocrats, often politically liberal). A dynamist, on the other hand, believes that “human betterment depends not on conformity to one central vision but on creativity and decentralized, open-ended trial and error.” For a good synopsis of the book, visit Dynamist.com.
Those who believe in the vision and advice put forth in “The Start-up of You” are dynamists at heart. They aspire to make the best of ever-changing conditions, as skillful surfers on inevitable waves of uncertainty. Individuals running their lives like start-ups seek opportunity in whatever form it presents itself and take appropriate risks, knowing that life and change are somewhat risky whether you acknowledge it or not. They envision multiple paths that the world and their lives can possibly take, and nimbly navigate these paths as necessary, for fun and for profit.
“The Start-up of You” mostly reads like a manual for improving one’s own prospects in a benign, rather than sociopathic, manner. However, Hoffman and Casnocha make a critical point in passing, and it deserves to be emphasized: running your life like a start-up (i.e., adapting to change) has important benefits not just for you, but for society. What we don’t need is a bunch of people unproductively and unhappily clinging to the past. What we do need is intrepid thinkers, makers, and doers, all vigorously exploring the futures that are emerging, inside the physical or virtual workplace and out. “The Start-up of You,” then, is really about the future and its friends — and the personal and social reasons you have to become one.
- Feb 29, 12
Dear readers, In case you hadn’t seen this on Twitter or Facebook or G+ already, just wanted to give you a heads up that I’ll now be sharing most of my education-related content over at the Huffington Post. Occasional book reviews and other miscellany will still appear here. Thanks for following! pjs
- Jan 09, 12
Recently, my good buddy Jason Becker shared this article with me over here. An excerpt:
New Hampshire’s Republican-dominated Legislature overrode Democratic Gov. John Lynch’s veto Wednesday to enact a law letting parents request an alternative curriculum for any subject they object to, legislation that critics say could limit children’s access to a comprehensive and quality education.
H.B. 542 initially passed by the state House and Senate last year, and was promptly vetoed by Lynch in July. In a statement explaining the decision, the governor wrote that the law — which allows parents to pull their children out of “objectionable” courses if they can finance the cost of instilling an alternative curriculum allowing the child to meet state requirements for education in that particular subject – does not clearly define what material can be considered objectionable, potentially giving individual parents the right to veto any lesson plan developed by a teacher.
The question of the cost of the bill is important, but let’s set that aside for now. The thing that interests me most about this is whether there are good moral reasons to object to such a policy.
Ideally, every student everywhere would receive a well-rounded, content-rich education facilitated by expert teachers. Of course and obviously, there are eight zillion political, moral, practical, epistemic, etc reasons why this is not the case. We instead inhabit a very imperfect world in which many actors with diverse values and beliefs act in generally well-intentioned but often ineffective and conflicting ways to create and sustain education as we know it.
So I think we can and should take a non-ideal perspective on matters of policy such as this (forgive me for not attempting to define the non-ideal here. Hopefully the concept is somewhat intuitive). In this, I take my cue from Harry Brighouse and his thoughtful, unconventional discussions in On Education, the work which has most colored my thinking, well, on education in the past year or so.
Instructive here is Brighouse’s position on religion in schools. Basically, he thinks that people in the U.S. have kind of fetishized the separation of church and state, by insisting that state funding not go to religiously-affiliated schools, because this results in a polarized set of educational alternatives: thoroughly secular public schools, and virtually unregulated religious private schools. Religious moderates (who far outnumber extremists) find themselves stuck between a rock and a hard place when deciding what to do for schools, and with some frequency end up choosing the arguably worse option of private, unregulated religious schools. From a big picture perspective, it would be better for children’s autonomy if some state funding were allowed to flow to religious schools in exchange for their cooperation on matters of basic education quality. This would draw many religious moderates back into the fold of public education, to the benefit of their children and society.
I want to take a similar position on the new NH law about the parental right to opt their children out of objectionable lessons. Context matters — we must compare the new law to the alternative state of affairs that would actually obtain in the absence of the law, not to some imaginary ideal. While we, the secular or those who otherwise disagree with would-be opt-outers, may dislike that some children will miss out on what we hold to be essential lessons, those children are ultimately likely to benefit from being kept in public schools even if they don’t benefit from each individual lesson on offer there. Public schools will still generally provide a more intellectually and socially diverse environment for learners than private schools or homeschooling (which relevantly, in NH, appears to be virtually unregulated).
So, to objectors to this policy, I would put the following serious and not rhetorical question: Would you really prefer that students migrate away from public schools and into the isolation of private and home schools rather than sit out a lesson on sex or evolution? Given hard thought, the answer to this on critics’ own terms based on their own values, may well be “no.”
- Jan 03, 12
I’m almost done with Martin Seligman’s well-known book of positive psychology, Authentic Happiness (2003). It’s been a very good read — although I was familiar with many of the relevant research findings, from my various internet travels (and Barking Up The Wrong Tree in particular), Seligman puts it all together and lays it out in a way that makes thinking about happiness much less muddled. Although I wasn’t excited to take a quiz that revealed my strengths (and, by extension, weaknesses…), this was a solid end-of-the-year/beginning-of-the-year choice: sciencey and self-helpy in equal proportions.
Seligman does well basically to refuse to engage in the endless philosophical debate over what happiness is, exactly. And he does seem to have taken seriously, and largely accomplished, his goal of providing a descriptive account of the constitutive elements of happiness and how to achieve and sustain them. In other words, Seligman does not suggest that the body of evidence regarding happiness necessarily has normative force for all readers; you may have some reasons — prudential and/or moral — not to do some of the things that conduce to happiness. (For example, you may have a principled commitment to retributive justice such that you reasonably choose not to forgive some wrongdoers in your life, even though research shows that forgiveness is an important element of happiness).
However, I’m worried that Seligman’s descriptive task goes notably off the rails towards the beginning of the book, in the midst of a cursory discussion of positive emotions. Seligman describes his friend Len who, despite “having made it big both in work and play,” remains “constitutionally at the low end of the spectrum of positive affectivity” (p. 34–35). Although Len is a high achiever, his achievements don’t do as much to make him feel as great, good, joyful, etc. as they would for most other people. Yet, Seligman maintains that, like Len (who eventually finds a compatible spouse for his “chilly” personality), “a person can be happy even if he or she does not have much in the way of positive emotion.”
This will come as welcome news to anyone who, like Len (and Seligman), finds himself on the low end of the positive emotion scale. But why believe it’s true? To claim that happiness doesn’t require much positive emotion is to commit to one particular — and controversial — normative conception of the best kind of life for a human being. Seligman has, in essence, defined away the possibility that happiness consists primarily in the positive emotions. It may be true that we can’t change where we fall on the positive emotion scale, and that it’s better to focus on what we can change than what we can’t. But Seligman’s statement is quite strong: happiness is ultimately independent of how much positive emotion one experiences. This entails a thick, normative, and controversial account of happiness; a matter that ought not to be settled by postulation.
Without having given it too much thought, I have the following pretheoretical view: Positive emotions either aren’t an important part of the good/flourishing/happy life for a human being, or they are. If they aren’t, then why pay special attention in the book to people who don’t experience many of them, and point out their ability to partake in other facets of the good/flourishing/happy life (e.g., achievement)? On the other hand, if positive emotions are an important part of the good/flourishing/happy life for a human being, then those with low positive affect have reason to want them, apart from the other facets of the good/flourishing/happy life they may have achieved, even if this is a difficult or even impossible task.
For those who tl;dr-ed, here’s the gist: Seligman claims to be providing a descriptive account of happiness, and not a normative one. However, in his extending the umbrella of happiness by definition to potentially cover those with somewhat or even drastically low positive affect, he makes important assumptions about the happy (or “good,” or “flourishing”) life for a human being. This isn’t necessarily bad or wrong, but it isn’t value-free.
In my opinion, it is better to keep the positive affectivity and achievement/satisfaction/etc. components of happiness entirely distinct, calling neither by itself “happiness,” for the sake of conceptual clarity. More on this later, maybe.
- Dec 16, 11
I have another post up at Kosmos: “Teaching Advice: Teaching to the Situation”
- Dec 13, 11
Common sense may suggest that increases in social welfare are more easily obtained by focusing resources on the mentally and/or physically handicapped, rather than using those resources instead to marginally improve non-handicapped individuals’ lives. The capabilities approach, as developed by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, would also imply that resources are well-spent when devoted to expanding the substantive freedoms and abilities of the handicapped.
You might think that improving the situation of the handicapped is an area in which non-utilitarian social welfare theory agrees with utilitarianism: if the handicapped are not so happy, and we know how to make them happier, and can do so efficiently, then we should. (Using a non-technical conception of utilitarianism here; feel free to question it).
But then Eric Barker comes along and shares, on his excellent Barking up the wrong tree blog, that an academic study’s “Results seemed to demonstrate essential equivalence in life satisfaction for handicapped, retarded, and normal persons.” Notice that the study’s subjects are members of the actual world, where accommodations for the handicapped exist, but not as extensively as social model theorists and other disability advocates request.
Assume that there is some truth to these findings (which I believe are consistent with a number of prior studies). Do they give us a reason to accept the capabilities approach, according to which the handicapped may still lack important capabilities and/or suffer from a false consciousness, etc. that makes their lives still less than good enough? Or should these findings about the life satisfaction of the handicapped assuage our former guilt for not having done enough to improve their lives?
In particular, I am trying to think about these findings in terms of their implications for expenditures on special education, which are large but difficult to measure and highly controversial (here’s a relevant recent post from Education Next). If the goal or purpose of education is rightly happiness, as Nel Noddings and others have suggested, then are extreme special education measures warranted if the handicapped turn out relatively happy without them? Or is this a repugnant conclusion that suggests that the proper goal of education is something other than happiness?
- Nov 27, 11
Last month, I read the article “Love and Anarchy” by Vivan Gornick in The Chronicle of Higher Education. It was adapted from a recently released book titled “Emma Goldman: Revolution as a Way of Life” by the same author. Because the essay was intriguing and, honestly, quite sexy, I quickly purchased the full book on Kindle.
Emma Goldman, anarchist, feminist, and free-lover, was a real character, to say the least. She was well-known in the late 19th and early 20th centuries for her fiery, eloquent, prolific lectures on both the political and the personal. As her biographer repeatedly stresses, Goldman’s staunch belief in freedom was not the product of reason but of emotion; she felt oppression in all its forms especially profoundly, and she felt the need for genuine and far-ranging freedom with an intensity foreign to all except her closest anarchist comrades; as such, Goldman’s lectures apparently conveyed moods more than arguments. This type of anarchism is interesting, for it stands in stark contrast to the kind of academic anarchism with which I’m familiar (although ultimately I can’t get on board with this emotional anarchism; a topic for another time).
However, Goldman’s across-the-board emotionality, elations and depressions and all, seems more exciting and less maladaptive in the short essay than it did in the full book. Although Goldman was an ardent proponent of free love and open marriages, she was prone to bouts of jealousy and therefore never able to put her ideals into a stable practice. To get a little Freudian, Goldman seems destined to perpetually yet unsuccessfully search for male affection to replace that which was lacking from her father. Hers are not the romantic liaisons of a liberated woman so much as a psychologically imprisoned one; the recounting of Goldman’s romantic history is thus more painful to read than it is enrapturing.
Indeed, the revolutionary’s entire life, and not just her love life, was cyclical and tempestuous in its swings between hope and despair, joy and sorrow. For this reason, the biography becomes slightly tedious to read — up and down, up and down, rinse and repeat. I don’t think this is the fault of the biographer, though, and is rather to her credit insofar as she accurately conveys Goldman’s bipolar moods.
Incidentally, this book serves as an effective way to learn about the political climate in this time period if you’ve all but forgotten everything about it you learned in school, like me. While the prose tends towards the over-the-top flowery, this may be necessary in order to capture the over-the-topness of Goldman herself. Not a must-read, but recommended, particularly to those with an interest in the (possibly pathological) psychology of radical politics. You could have no better character study than Emma Goldman.
- Nov 20, 11
In case you missed it, I had another guest post up at Kosmos recently on the topic of transferring graduate schools.
