The Bear (Seasons 1&2); Culture change mirrors and dances with individual change

 The Bear, Jeremy Allen White, HULU, FX Series, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Culture, Culture Change

The Bear is tremendous television.  I highly recommend it.  That said, it can be hard to get started on.  It is filmed in a very rough fashion.  It feels like watching a documentary, or reality TV, but actually, as it moves along, it feels more like a home movie, and, while this leads to a disjointed feel, it eventually draws you in as a viewer.  It is as if you are a member of the family being let in on what goes on inside of and behind the scenes of your favorite local diner.  If you haven’t seen it and you don’t mind spoilers, read on, but I start with the end and work backwards on this one, so spoilers abound because it is hard to think about the content of this film (I can’t help thinking of it as a film, even though it is a series from FX) without interrogating the content.

In the last episode of season two (all that is out at this writing), Carmy Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White), is locked in the walk-in cooler of his newly renovated and now quite upscale restaurant during its “friends and family” soft opening.  His “cousin” Ritchie Jerimovich (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) has had to take over the role of Chef de Cuisine to run the restaurant in Carmy’s absence and salvage what could have been a disaster.  Ritchie observes Claire (Molly Gordon), Carmy’s girlfriend, leaving the area near the walk-in cooler in tears, and he surmises that Carmy has broken her heart through the cooler’s still locked door.  Ritchie goes to the door and shouts a deeply psychoanalytic interpretation at Carmy.  “You are Dee-Dee.  You are Donna,” he shouts, essentially accusing Carmy of becoming his mother.

Wow!  And isn’t he? And hasn’t he?  Good thing we have a psychoanalyst around (reluctant though he may be) to help us deconstruct this interpretation!

To prepare to think about the interpretation, we need to decode the complicated relationship between Carmy and his mother, Donna – played masterfully by Jamie Lee Curtis, who has been introduced only two episodes before and who makes a brief appearance in this final episode, but who, it is now apparent, has been hovering over Carmy’s life as we have seen it throughout the series as much or more than the ghost of Carmy’s older brother Mikey (Jon Bernthal) who bequeathed the restaurant to Carmy in his suicide note four months before the start of the series.

To be clear, The Bear was a gripping series long before Jamie Lee Curtis showed up, but her showstopping performance cements into place the central dynamic elements of the series.  In Donna/Dee Dee/Jamie Lee’s episode, we see her in flashback, when Mikey is still alive, slaving in the kitchen to produce the meal of the seven fishes for Christmas dinner.  As mentioned before, one of the draws of the series is the filming, which is (intentionally, I am certain) slipshod.  I’m guessing there are a lot of hand-held cameras and the editing is a bit rough.  And Jamie Lee Curtis’s episode is even shot on film in low lighting, and the graininess helps us feel, in a very close and uncomfortable way, like we are there,  not just watching, but feeling the evening unfold.  You know, at a certain point, that there is no way for it to end except badly, but it just keeps getting worse.

Christmas is a complicated holiday.  There is an incredible amount of preparation that goes into creating the “perfect” experience.  The shopping, cooking, decorating and travel create a pressure cooker that, if all goes well, produces a space that is insulated, somehow, from the rest of one’s life – the very toil and trouble that has created this moment.  But the pressure to create that moment can also cause cracks in it, and once those cracks start, the strain of serving the needs of others whom we love enough to want them to experience the magic of Christmas, can explode, as it does here.

A fine dining experience, when it goes well, is a little like the magic of Christmas.  It is an experience that is walled off from the rest of our lives – and it creates an internal experience – a feeling – that is truly sublime.  The first time I ate in a Michelin rated restaurant was in college.  I ate there with a friend.  We couldn’t come close to affording dinner, but we scraped together enough to eat breakfast.  In the moment after a stack of dishes fell and broke, I realized how good I had been feeling as a result of the meal and the company.  The second time that I ate in a Michelin rated restaurant, after I could afford it, it was magic.  The next day, I went to a local eatery with coworkers and the waitress said that she would be serving us today and I thought, “I know you think that, but I now know what true service is, and I don’t think what you have to offer will measure up.”  The fine dining experience, when done well, is as close to seamless as a human experience can be and it is something to be treasured.

This series actually creates a magical experience of its own.  The Berzatto family is one that takes in strays.  Ritchie is such a stray.  He is a cousin by choice, not by birth.  And the restaurant employees are also like family.  In fact, the restaurant is a second, broader family by choice.  I think that we as viewers are invited in, not as viewers, but as family members.  We identity with the crazy and lovely aspects of the family and the business.  The reluctant wife, as an ice breaker, often asks groups that include mucky mucks to talk about their first jobs.  Many of them worked in the restaurant industry or other service jobs that require hard work but not much skill.  Bonding quickly takes place over the hazards and complexities of those early jobs and the mucky mucks and the average Joe’s find that they have a lot in common as they remember what it was like to work in a pressure cooker atmosphere aimed at pleasing the gustatory customer.  I think that we recognize the space that is created here as one that is familiar, but also, thankfully, not our own, and we can vicariously experience it without having to clean up the messes that are created.

But it may also be that I am more susceptible than others to identifying with this family.  I was born in Chicago, but, because of my father’s peripatetic career, I have lived much of my life in exile.  My mother grew up in Chicago and, later, the suburbs.  Two of my cousins on my father’s side ended up opening a bar and restaurant in Chicago.  It was a family business that was a pressure cooker of its own sort – and I was able to vicariously participate from afar (which was much easier than being directly involved) as it got started, flourished, and then crashed and burned.  Though the arc of this story is different, the interaction of family and work dynamics seems very, very familiar, including the tensions between members of the family that have different skill sets, different personal characteristics, and different senses of feeling loved by different members of the family.

Carmy grew up in a sprawling Italian family.  The restaurant that his brother ran (and almost ran into the ground), Chicago Beef, was a sandwich shop that served an urban neighborhood, while the family lived in the suburbs.  When Carmy became old enough, he left Chicago, fleeing from the craziness of his family and searching for a better life.  He found one, sort of, working his way up the ladder of the restaurant business, becoming the Chef de Cuisine at one of the great restaurants in the world.  And there, despite his skills, he was lorded over by a sadistic chef who berated him, encouraging him to work harder and faster.  And, we are left to surmise, he harbored a dream: He wanted to return home and partner with his brother, hoping that his brother could sober up from all the pills and whatnot he was on, so they could transform the sandwich shop into a new restaurant – one that would create a more nuanced experience than the Chicago beef sandwiches that were the mainstay of the business as it was currently run.

When Carmy returns to Chicago, his inheritance is complicated.  The business is failing, and he jumps in with both hands to make sure that it does not go under, but this is complicated by the inertia of the restaurant as it has been, including the people that go with it; Cousin Ritchie, Tina Marrero (Liza Colón-Zayas) the sassy linecook, as well as Carmy’s sister, Natalie "Sugar" Berzatto (Abby Elliott) who also has an interest in the business, and his Uncle, Jimmy "Cicero" Kalinowski (Oliver Platt), who is financially involved.  Carmy is trying to both preserve and change something that all cherish, that all are invested in, and that none but he see the evolutionary potential.  

Carmy’s first gambit, then, is to hire someone from the outside to help him act as a change agent.  Sydney Adamu (Ayo Edebiri) fits the bill because she has burned every other bridge and, unbeknownst to Carmy, has eaten his food at the high end place he worked for out of town and she is a true believer in him and what he can do with food.  She is also black and she is odd – she is not comfortable in her skin.  It is almost embarrassing to see her on the screen with all the other actors that fit so comfortably into their roles.  It is as if she is the only actor – the only one trying to act a part rather than be someone.  This is, in my estimation, not a sign of her failing to be a good actor, but a sign of her ability to act.  Her self-consciousness is just what the role calls for.  Sydney is, unlike the rest of the characters, uncertain of herself and how she fits in – not just at the restaurant, but in life.  She is, as it were, playing at being human, so she is the one who is most open to the possibility of change.  Carmy has a vision of what the restaurant will be, no matter how muddy, while she is just awkwardly trying to figure out how to have any vision, of a menu item, of a wardrobe choice, of a topic of conversation, that will work.  Her anxiety about not fitting in, about not being centered in herself, leads her to try out and try on all kinds of different new things as she almost spastically tries to become herself.

So the first season can be summarized as a war for the soul of the restaurant.  Carmy and Sydney are trying to bring the old guard up to speed and the old guard are resisting it.  The old and the new (with the exception of Sydney) want the restaurant as the restaurant it has been to work, they want to preserve the legacy of Mikey, the guy who was fun to be with and who could, by dint of his charisma, make everything fun and crazy, but they want to be able to do what he was not able to: keep the bottom from rotting out.  Carmy is trying to instigate culture change – creating a culture where what matters is not the glitter of having a barely functional working space, but the content of producing something of value.  He and Sydney share a vision of the restaurant producing an experience within the people who consume what is offered that is sublime.  In order to affect this, the staff needs to shift in the way that they work together on creating that experience.

The functional changes that Carmy and Sydney institute are, on the surface, simply matters of protocol.  The employees now call each other “chef” and they call out to each other as they move around the kitchen so that they don’t run into each other.  They wash their dishes and keep their spaces clean.  These are the practices of higher end restaurants like the ones where Carmy has been working, but they are foreign to the functioning of a Chicago Beef place that is turning out sandwiches for the lunch crowd.  The culture – the people who have been working in the sandwich shop – resist the changes.  They are used to doing things the way they are used to doing them.  But they are also intrigued by the possibility of thinking about themselves in new ways.  They begin to recognize that what Carmy is offering is something that would not just elevate the experience of the customers, but it would elevate their experience of themselves.  This creates a sense of intrigue, but they don’t know what they are shooting for, or how to get there, and there is considerable anxiety about whether they have what it takes to make the transition. 

The first season ends with a tremendous performance from Jeremy Allen White as he recounts his experience of losing his brother and the impact that has had on him.  It also ends with the surprise discovery of financial resources assumed to have been lost to drug dealing that are in fact stored away on premises and that can be used to fuel Carmy’s vision of what the place could be in the second season.

So the second season unfolds as a series of short stories that allow us to understand the characters that make up the restaurant family.  We learn their back stories and we see how they individually come to make the changes that will allow them to become a functional family – one that will work to remake the restaurant.  All of this is set against a series of catastrophes that threaten to derail the rebuilding of the restaurant, the central of which is Carmy’s failure of heart.  He is distracted from what should be his central and driving concern by his relationship with Claire (Molly Gordon).  This keeps him from attending to the necessary details of getting the door fixed on the walk-in fridge that leads to the ultimate moment of being unable to preside over the soft opening of his restaurant.  Sydney and Sugar are left to be the driving forces as Carmy orchestrates, but with a distracted air.

I said a moment ago that we get the back stories of the characters, but we also get to see them more fully become themselves as they engage in a series of exercises that Carmy comes up with that allow them to explore, outside the confines of the restaurant, who it is that they can become.  Tina Marrero goes to the Culinary Institute of Chicago, the pastry chef studies with a chef in Denmark (where Carmy had a stop on his journey to learn the trade), and, after the episode with Donna/Dee Dee Jamie Lee Curtis, cousin Ritchie spends a week in the kind of restaurant that he defensively disdains – one that he could never afford to eat in, but one that he would secretly kill to be able to claim as a place that he works.  And we see him transform, in the final episode, into the kind of person that he could only have dreamt of being – the person who can confidently fill in the role of chef de cuisine when Carmy gets locked in the walk-in.

So in the Christmas episode, one facet of the manifold complicated interactions that are taking place is the interaction between Carmy and his mother.  She is demanding that others help her and that they leave the kitchen and she is complaining that they never help her all the while managing not just the seven fishes dish (the meaning of which no one seems to quite understand) but a plethora of other complicated dishes all needing time in the oven simultaneously.  Through the chaos of her cooking and her moods, Carmy is tuned in to his mother and her needs.  He knows what it takes to keep her precariously on track, to emotionally resonate with her and to hold her together so that the next step can be taken.  And he knows how to anticipate which dishes need to be attended to while flying under the radar that would lead his mother to think he thought she couldn’t manage what she is doing.  But this is dangerous business, this business of keeping one’s mother on track.  It requires a lot of work, it is highly anxiety producing, and it ends up being something that one might resent as much as Donna clearly resents preparing the elaborate meal that the entire family looks forward to eating.

So this series is presenting something like a paradox.  Carmy is the generative mastermind that is helping his staff, many of whom are his friends as well as employees, make the kind of personal transformations that will allow for a cultural shift that well create a new functional work space.  At the same time, Carmy himself is undergoing a kind of retrograde personal shift.  His single-minded focus, learned while managing his mother’s mercurial moods (and cooking) drove him to get out from under her oppressive oversight, and became his support system as he competed in the realm of high-end cooking.  But now that he has the ability to harness this for his own good, he is wavering.  Not completely in a bad way.  He is entertaining the possibility of allowing someone else into his world – he is not just partnering with Sydney in the business, but falling in love.  And maybe, just maybe, this is helping him realize that he has needs; significant unresolved needs that deserve to be attended to.  Needs for nurturance and support and connection with someone who really understands him, even if that understanding also comes at the cost of interfering with his unwavering attention to serving others.

When Ritchie accuses Carmy of having become Donna, he senses that Carmy has driven away someone who could love and care for him, and that Carmy is pretending that he doesn’t need this, while his behavior cries out that he does.  The complicating factor, of course, is that tending to the relationship with Claire has interfered with his ability to attend to the restaurant, and therefore to his customers, exemplified by his having failed to replace the door handle to the walk-in cooler, including by forgetting to make the call for the repair because he took a call from Claire.

Daniel Stern, in his book on infants relating to others, clarifies what Carmy demonstrates so clearly in this series.  We are built to relate to others.  As infants, we thrive when others closely attend to us and communicate to us that they get what our needs, but perhaps more importantly, our desires are.  When we have internalized a sense of ourselves and are able to articulate our needs to others while also meeting their needs, we achieve a state of equilibrium.  But this state is rare and difficult to achieve.  Carmy has long been laboring in the desert.  He has been trying to build himself on his own foundation, rather than a foundation that is connected to others.  He hasn’t connected to others, apparently, because it is too painful to do that.  His older brother made fun of him.  His mother demanded too much from him, so he headed out on his own, and he got a considerable distance, but it didn’t create a foundation within himself that is like the one he has been preparing for others.

Many people come into my profession from similar backgrounds.  We work to provide a foundation for others in part because we are seeking such a foundation for ourselves.  Perhaps this is a contributing factor to the high rate of suicide in those professions.  I don’t think that Carmy has such a dark future ahead of him, though it might have something to with the suicide of his brother.  I think that the community that Carmy is building will help sustain him and support his seeking out the kind of support that he needs, that is, after all, the arc of the other characters, but I think both he and Sydney are in need of support, and it can be particularly hard to acquire genuine support as leaders in an organization where you are expected to support others and the others don’t always see the need for the leader to be supported.

What I intended to point out here, though, is that culture change does not occur in the culture – culture is amorphous and dependent on the functioning of the individual members, and ultimately for a culture to change, the individuals have to change.  As I write this, I am in Florida, where I visited an art museum that included the works of Seminole Indians.  In a video by one of the artists, he noted that the elders taught him the basic skills that he needed, then sent him out to explore his craft (in his case it was building dug out canoes).  As he worked, he came up with questions, which he took back to the elders, who would suggest that they had solved the problem he was presenting in a particular way, and he could use that, or he could find a novel way to solve the problem.  It occurred to me in that moment that culture and cultures are not static, and that they are, as depicted in The Bear, fluid entities powered by the interactions between people with complex individual histories that are shaped by the flow of the previous culture through those they have interacted with.

 The Bear asks us to think about who it is that we are as individuals and in relation to others.  It clarifies that neither the individual nor the culture has unlimited degrees of freedom to change.  We are embedded in the culture that has supported and sustained us, but we can also contribute to changing that culture - often by changing ourselves and the ways that we interact with others.  We can, through effort and hard work, move closer to being the person that we would imagine ourselves to be.

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here.

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The COVID Chronicles: Catholic Social Teaching used to support returning to the classroom...

 

So this blog as a whole is not really about COVID, but lately I keep falling into that rabbit hole, so I have decided to more fully inhabit it.  COVID has taken up more and more of my conscious (and unconscious) life, especially as the opening of school has approached.  Mindful of the observation of an historian about the 1918 flu pandemic that very little writing about that period was done – the surmise was that people were ashamed of their actions so didn’t record them – with some trepidation I will go on marking what I say while recognizing that even now I feel that I may, someday, want to delete these thoughts from the ether.

 

In my last posting on this subject, I was trying to make an argument – it was a weak argument – that fiscally the University should close because we might take on long term expenses if COVID turns out to be a chronic illness and we have to not just manage the short term illnesses of faculty and staff, but their long term difficulties. 

 

Despite the fact that I knew it was a weak and even a bit of a whiny and last minute argument, I made it in a faculty meeting with our representatives to the administration.  A number of other faculty resonated with my article, which was nice, it meant I wasn’t alone, but the leader of our faculty group was unclear what to do with my argument.  Who should I take it to?  Whose province is this?  I asked that he be in contact with administrators and ask questions such as: What are the conditions under which we would not start school?  What are the conditions under which we will pivot to on-line learning?  He agreed to do this.

 

Yesterday he sent out a communique from the COVID task force that stated they were addressing such things as what the criteria would be for students to return home (the Reluctant Son’s position is that this will happen when the first kid dies at Arizona State, then all the schools will hear from parents and send their kids home.  I think this is a reasonable scenario).  Included in the email was a link to a panel discussion of Catholic Social Teaching and COVID.  I was curious, so I watched it.

 

I learned a lot.  Among other things, these folks were taking the position that keeping schools open was good for our brown and black employees – those who are least empowered – because they are the ones most likely to be furloughed if the school is to close.  It is also good for our brown and black students who are more likely to come from disadvantaged backgrounds and therefore to have more difficulty accessing technology and quiet study space at home than on campus – and that campus jobs are an important source of income while they are in school.  So staying open is a good thing, especially as we think about structural inequalities and systemic racism. 

 

Similarly, in terms of Social Justice, this is a time for us to be refurbishing our curricula to address in the classroom the racial inequalities that have been exposed by COVID.  The greater proportion of black and brown people who have been infected with COVID, and the higher percentage of those who have been infected who have died.  So we should be exposing the ways in which the social and economic structures privilege those of us who are white and chronically – not just at times of COVID – disadvantage those who are brown and black.  I especially agree with this point.  This is, indeed, a moral imperative.

 

But I was struck that all four panelists were speaking from the position that it was an economic reality that schools must start in the fall, and therefore that they will.  They were asking us to empathize with the decision makers who will likely face what they called moral injury – a psychological term they acknowledged they borrowed from the VA which emerged as the part of PTSD that is based on having hurt others in ways that are inconsistent with one’s conscience – we should empathize with the moral injury that will result for administrators when staff and faculty members die as a result of their decisions.  They went on to suggest that we prepare for a period of lamentation – of remembering and atoning for our sins after this crisis has passed – when we acknowledge what we have done.

 

They did this while blaming the administration of the country for their poor handling of the outbreak.  We have become an international pariah, they noted, because we have not taken the steps that are needed to contain the outbreak.  But then they implied that we were disempowered from doing anything but moving ahead in the direction we are going.  We can’t not open, was essentially the position they were taking.  Our leaders, when they mirror national leadership, should receive our pity for what they are being forced to do.

 

There is an article in the Atlantic that accuses schools of preparing to blame the students for negative consequences.  The Catholic Social Teaching group also seemed to be casting blame outside – “We have to do this.”  But they were not saying, “Should we do this?”  “How much (more) of a pay reduction would we have to take to teach online and to weather this storm – to keep our employees on board – including those we would otherwise furlough like the cafeteria workers and the dormitory staff?”  “Is that something we are able to do?”  These questions were not asked.

 

I feel like we are sailing blindly forward into a predictable future (and God, I hope I am wrong), creating moral havens for ourselves as we engage in behavior that is likely harmful to our students, their parents, our staff and faculty, and to society at large.  It seems that we have lost all moral relationship to our role as potential superspreader sites.  As if, in addition to American exceptionalism, we have the exceptionalism of the Ivory tower on our side.

 

As a psychoanalyst – to return to the point of these posts for a moment – I get it that this appears to be a very large exercise in managing the unconscious guilt that is part and parcel of much of our human functioning.  I also get it that there is group think going on (a psychological, not a psychoanalytic term).  But I guess I felt that our exceptionalism – as institutions of higher learning that value scientific knowledge and especially as homes of the Humanities that value self-knowledge – that our exceptionalism would lie in being willing to be what one of my colleagues calls the moral rebel:  The person (or, in this case, people) who are able to say – NO, THIS DOESN’T MAKE SENSE.

 

Sadly, my hopes are not being realized.

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here. 

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), just enter your email in the subscribe by email box to the right of the text.

For other posts on COVID:

I:       Apocalypse Now  my first posting on COVID-19.

II:      Midnight in Paris  is a jumping off point for more thinking about COVID.  (Also in Movies).

III:    Hans Selye and the Stress Response Syndrome.  COVID becomes more normal... for now.

IV:    Letter on the occasion of a Town Hall Meeting

V:      COVID craziness at the University continues with no end in sight.

VI:    Get back in that classroom  Paranoid ruminations.

VII:   Why Shutting Classes Makes Fiscal Sense A weak argument

VIII: Catholic Social Teaching Marshaled to support Rationalization...

IX:    What will school look like?

X:     Denial is not just a river in Egypt...

XI:    Back in the Classroom

XII:  Labor Day is for WORK!

XIII: Ennui

XIV. Where, Oh Where have my in-person students gone?  Split zoom classes in the age of COVID.

XV.  The First Complete COVID Semester is Done.

XVI.      More of the Same: The Second COVID Semester begins.

XVII.     Surviving the First Year of COVID: Will education be the same?

XVIII.    I miss my mask?

IXX.      Bo Burnham's Inside Commentary on the commenter.

XX.       The Olympics Mark the Oddness of the Time In Between.

XXI.      It's baaaack...  Joy and Horror and Maybe a Little Bit of Hope

XXII.     The Great Resignation Hits Home

XXIII.    The Great Resignation (cont.): A Family Reunion

XXIV.    COVID in the Classroom: The Great Dis-integrator

XXV.     First COVID, Now No Snow Days?

XXVI.   Not with a Bang but a Whimper: COVID is over... or is it?

XXVII.  Post COVID (we can hope) reflections on morale and morals...

XXVIII. How will we move on from our Empire of Pain? (Also in books)

XXIX.    A New Year's reminiscence.

COVID Craziness at the University Continues – With No End in Sight

 

One advantage of an executive team for making decisions is that the group is small and therefore nimble.  They can come to a consensus and act.  Even if they don’t agree they can get things done.  Decision making in a large group is painful.  It is slow and cumbersome and problematic.

 

The executive team at our University has made a lot of decisions recently.  They have decided we will be having in person classes, at least at the beginning of the year.  They have also decided, because of budgetary uncertainty, to cut our salaries and to institute across the board savings.  They have also offered buy outs to help reduce the number of faculty and staff to create additional savings.

 

The faculty and staff assemblies are (I think rightly) concerned that though the executive team thinks that have collaborated with us in the spirit of “shared governance” that is intended to be a hallmark of the university, we have not experienced it as this at all – it feels like we have been told that we will have to make do with less or leave. 

 

The response of the faculty assembly has been to revisit the changes that have been rolled out.  We have a more equitable plan for changing the salaries.  We want to be reassured that if enrollment returns our salaries will as well.

 

I get this desire, but I think our efforts are misplaced.  We should, I believe, be looking at what is coming up, not at what has already been decided.  We can revisit that stuff later.  If the imposition of salary changes has been unequitable, then the reinstatement of salaries can be crafted to create a more equitable relationship between those who make the least at the institution and those who make the most and we can work on that.

 

I think it is our job to remind the executive committee why we are here.  We are a public trust.  As a Jesuit Catholic institution, we also have particular obligations to particular constituent groups.  We serve the general and a particular public, and we have a central mission that is invaluable.  In a time of uncertainty, we need to look to our core values and to preserving those as we move forward.

 

The central part of our mission statement is that the University exists to teach.  That’s what we are here for.

 

One of my, but I believe, our central beliefs is that synchronous, in person teaching is the best pedagogical tool that we have.  Conversation as a means of communicating – even though, and perhaps partly because, it is such a difficult way to communicate – is central to the best learning. 

 

Conversations are hard because the ideas we cherish are being questioned and we have to hold onto the idea while also hearing the concerns that others have with those ideas.  This is a tremendously complicated psychological and cognitive task – but it is one that is critical to the learning enterprise. 

 

Conversation becomes more difficult when we are remote.  We can and will assign asynchronous tasks as we always have – papers, long and short and with varying foci will be part of the pedagogy.  So will we assign homework with problems to solve and ideas to react to.  But discussion – the verbal communication between two or more people is at the heart of our pedagogy.

 

Discussions are necessary because we need to see people thinking – to hear the thoughts being formed – and to see how they are shaped in the cauldron of conversation in order to a) not follow our own thoughts into a rabbit hole of logical sense divorced from consensual reality and b) to hear from others so that we can learn from their experience and perspectives.

 

So: we should move towards having in person classes because those are the best kinds of classes to provide the kind of teaching that we value most highly.  And we should do this in the context of protecting the safety of the students, staff, and faculty to the best of our ability.  If we are to open in the fall we should do so as safely as possible.

 

This means that: masks should be available to all students, faculty and staff.  It would make sense for the University to provide both cloth masks for those who don’t have them but also plenty of disposable masks for individuals who forget them.  We should work on signage and other means of getting out the message that “No Masks, No Class”.  We should make it clear that wearing a mask is cool and considerate of others.  Taiwan, with a population of 20 million people, has under 500 cases of COVID and fewer than 10 deaths at this writing, AND THEY ARE NOT USING SOCIAL DISTANCING.  They are using masks.  Everyone is wearing them.  This virus is transmitted through droplets born on breath, coughs and sneezes.  If we are going to breathe the same air, let’s make sure it has been filtered at the source.  Everyone must wear masks.  It has to become basic to our culture as an extension of our valuing consideration of the other.

 

Because social distancing is required where we are, we are being told to prepare to teach to sections of class that are in the room while other parts of the class are joining remotely or not in the classroom.  We need tools to be able to teach in this way.  The classrooms need to be fitted with adequate cameras that will broadcast good quality images and with very good microphones.  Our laptop cams and mics are not up to the task.  We need the tools to be able to use the white board on Zoom as a true whiteboard.  Our laptops have pads that are TERRIBLE for drawing on the Zoom white board.  We need, at minimum, mice that will work well, but ideally some form of tablet that can be connected to the zoom whiteboard.

 

It also means that we should be regularly testing students, faculty, and staff and demanding quarantine for those who test positive – even, or perhaps especially, when they are not symptomatic.

 

Oh, and by the way, we should also meet in person because this is important to the economic health of the University.  But economic health, while an important consideration, is not primary.  What is primary, and needs to be kept primary, is that we have a culture of learning.  And this culture, which is dependent on direct contact in ways that we can’t appreciate until it is taken away (including extracurricular contact between students as well as contacts between students and faculty and students and staff) should be protected in the concrete world as long as we can safely do that, and when we can’t, we should make the best virtual analogue of that so that we can deliver the best possible education we are able.

 

And we should bear in mind that the reason that the economic well-being of the University is important is that it is necessary to support the culture that supports the students doing the necessary and important work that they are doing.  Economic well-being is necessary to our survival, but not the reason for our existence.  The reason for our existence is the culture that we have created that at its best can lead to improving the lives of our students.

 

As a corollary of that, we should continue to do the best we can to work together – executive team, faculty, and staff, to craft the best possible experience that we can for our students – including one that is safe for them, for their families, and for those who serve them. 

 

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here. 

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), just enter your email in the subscribe by email box to the right of the text.

For other posts on COVID:

I:       Apocalypse Now  my first posting on COVID-19.

II:      Midnight in Paris  is a jumping off point for more thinking about COVID.  (Also in Movies).

III:    Hans Selye and the Stress Response Syndrome.  COVID becomes more normal... for now.

IV:    Letter on the occasion of a Town Hall Meeting

V:      COVID craziness at the University continues with no end in sight.

VI:    Get back in that classroom  Paranoid ruminations.

VII:   Why Shutting Classes Makes Fiscal Sense A weak argument

VIII: Catholic Social Teaching Marshaled to support Rationalization...

IX:    What will school look like?

X:     Denial is not just a river in Egypt...

XI:    Back in the Classroom

XII:  Labor Day is for WORK!

XIII: Ennui

XIV. Where, Oh Where have my in-person students gone?  Split zoom classes in the age of COVID.

XV.  The First Complete COVID Semester is Done.

XVI.      More of the Same: The Second COVID Semester begins.

XVII.     Surviving the First Year of COVID: Will education be the same?

XVIII.    I miss my mask?

IXX.      Bo Burnham's Inside Commentary on the commenter.

XX.       The Olympics Mark the Oddness of the Time In Between.

XXI.      It's baaaack...  Joy and Horror and Maybe a Little Bit of Hope

XXII.     The Great Resignation Hits Home

XXIII.    The Great Resignation (cont.): A Family Reunion

XXIV.    COVID in the Classroom: The Great Dis-integrator

XXV.     First COVID, Now No Snow Days?

XXVI.   Not with a Bang but a Whimper: COVID is over... or is it?

XXVII.  Post COVID (we can hope) reflections on morale and morals...

XXVIII. How will we move on from our Empire of Pain? (Also in books)

XXIX.    A New Year's reminiscence.

Letter on the Occasion of a Town Hall Meeting at a Jesuit University in the Midst of Three Health Crises

First, I want to thank the executive team for meeting in a town hall format with the faculty and staff.  I was particularly appreciative of the opening prayer and its call for us to think about life over property, especially at a time like this; not an easy thing to do.  I also appreciate that we are all concerned about property – meaning compensation and the continued financial well-being of the campus.  Certainly the questions were focused on them and therefore channeled the conversation in that direction.  But I was struck at the contrast between the prayer’s calling us to reflect on the marginalized and on living in a stratified culture long after the need for that has disappeared while, in the meeting proper, we focused on preserving the source of our collective livelihood. 

 

A Jesuit education accomplishes many goals – some of which are internally contradictory.  We are educating men and women for and with others while we simultaneously elevate them to being able to be employed in ways that will let them join the upper middle class (or maintain their privileged position in that class).  I fear that those we would elevate are often saddled with debt that will prevent them from crawling out from a lower class and instead will plunge them deeper into it.

 

As a society, we have moved, in my lifetime, from seeing higher education as a bare bones means of helping society train their future leaders and investing in training those leaders because that is good for society, to charging students (generally by putting them deeply in debt) because of the benefits that they as individuals will reap from that education.  And providing cushy seats for them while they do it.  In the process, we have moved from a society that supports service for others to one that supports entitlement of the individual because they have “suffered” (in luxury) and thus deserve the disproportionate income they will one day achieve.

 

One writer, the gifted novelist Marilynne Robinson, has posited that this is ultimately based on a shared experience of scarcity, which she finds remarkable in the richest nation the world has ever produced.  Her thesis, and I agree with it, is that we are prey to anxieties about survival and therefore lose track of what it means to embrace the all too brief life that we have been given on this earth.  I think this was on ample display in this town hall – and I think we all shared in the creation of a general experience of that anxiety.

 

This COVID-19 thing is a bump in the road.  We don’t know how big it is – but it will be something that we will address.  While we are addressing it, other issues emerge.  Certainly the second health crisis – the crisis of racial and class inequality and its consequent health (including mental health) sequelae has exploded into our collective consciousness.  But so has the third issue of the health of the planet.  The wisdom of creating climate change and the other consequences of continuing to be a fossil fuel dependent and blindly hurtling forward let’s consolidate wealth for the wealthy society we are is becoming clearer (I’m a deeply invested player in this game, btw – please don’t hear me as being above any of this).

 

But the silver lining to all of this – if we don’t spend every single freaking second of our time trying to fix it - is that it gives us an opportunity to pause.  To realize the brevity of our existence.  To evaluate our values.  What do we care about?  As a University, as individuals, as spiritual and religious people, and as a society as a whole, we care about many internally contradictory things.  And this moment is pregnant with all of those contradictions and difficulties.

 

So, as we are attending to the things that we are worrying about and trying to fix them, please also let’s spend some time remembering that we are being given a big, ugly, difficult and unwanted gift.  Melanie Klein, a notoriously cranky but prescient psychoanalyst once observed that there is nothing more aggressive that we can do than give someone a gift.  The Universe (God?) has given us a gift.  A complex difficult, multilayered gift.  And we are in a relatively privileged position from which to engage with it – or should be.  If we can lift our heads up from all of the dross – we may be able to recognize that we are being confronted with the kinds of issues that can shape our souls and our futures. We should be thinking not just about how to balance the budget (and build in a surplus at these times?  If this isn’t a time to tap into our rainy day fund, I would hate to see the storm that will empower us to do that…), but to balance ourselves.  To figure out how to surf on the waves that this storm has produced, using the board that we have been waxing throughout our lives as a means of conveying not just ourselves, but each other through these treacherous tides.

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here. 

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), just enter your email in the subscribe by email box to the right of the text.

For other posts on COVID:

I:       Apocalypse Now  my first posting on COVID-19.

II:      Midnight in Paris  is a jumping off point for more thinking about COVID.  (Also in Movies).

III:    Hans Selye and the Stress Response Syndrome.  COVID becomes more normal... for now.

IV:    Letter on the occasion of a Town Hall Meeting

V:      COVID craziness at the University continues with no end in sight.

VI:    Get back in that classroom  Paranoid ruminations.

VII:   Why Shutting Classes Makes Fiscal Sense A weak argument

VIII: Catholic Social Teaching Marshaled to support Rationalization...

IX:    What will school look like?

X:     Denial is not just a river in Egypt...

XI:    Back in the Classroom

XII:  Labor Day is for WORK!

XIII: Ennui

XIV. Where, Oh Where have my in-person students gone?  Split zoom classes in the age of COVID.

XV.  The First Complete COVID Semester is Done.

XVI.      More of the Same: The Second COVID Semester begins.

XVII.     Surviving the First Year of COVID: Will education be the same?

XVIII.    I miss my mask?

IXX.      Bo Burnham's Inside Commentary on the commenter.

XX.       The Olympics Mark the Oddness of the Time In Between.

XXI.      It's baaaack...  Joy and Horror and Maybe a Little Bit of Hope

XXII.     The Great Resignation Hits Home

XXIII.    The Great Resignation (cont.): A Family Reunion

XXIV.    COVID in the Classroom: The Great Dis-integrator

XXV.     First COVID, Now No Snow Days?

XXVI.   Not with a Bang but a Whimper: COVID is over... or is it?

XXVII.  Post COVID (we can hope) reflections on morale and morals...

XXVIII. How will we move on from our Empire of Pain? (Also in books)

XXIX.    A New Year's reminiscence.

Two Popes - Fictional Movie Narratives can be Useful

The Francis Effect.  It has been huge.  One small piece of it is an uptick in applicants for the priesthood.  The most recent applicant whose psychological testing I completed tied his interest in reaffirming his faith to seeing Pope Francis when he last came to the United States.  Francis is, as they say, a rock star – but a weird kind of rock star.  His fame is based on being self-effacing rather than self-aggrandizing.  He espouses a church for and by the people rather than one that serves the priesthood.  He emulates the Christ that he, as the head of the church, represents.

The film The Two Popes centers on a fictional account of a series of conversations between Pope Benedict XVI (Played by Anthony Hopkins) and the future Pope Francis, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio (Jonathan Pryce).  The conversations did not take place, but the dramatization allows us to take a peak at the shifts that occurred in the church as the result of the resignation of Benedict and the election of Francis.  This view is a personal perspective, abeit an informed personal perspective, from the screenwriter, Anthony McCarten and the director Fernando Meirelles.

This post is also a personal appraisal of that enactment, so you should know a little bit about me and the perspective that I bring to it.  I was raised an Episcopalian and I teach at a Jesuit University.  Before working at a Jesuit University, I started to learn about the Catholic Church from a liberal psychologist friend who is a Benedictine Hermit.  This was before the time of Francis.  My friend, who was no fan of the Jesuits, was concerned about the direction of the church.  He felt that it was in the hands of men who were out of touch with what Catholics were truly concerned about.  A priest in Nicaragua echoed these concerns when Benedict was Pope, saying that the Pope was surrounded by “Crows” who were cackling to him and distracting him from the true needs and mission of the church.

The film opens with the election of Benedict.  This serves the function of immersing us in church protocol.  For Catholics, and those who follow the church, my guess is that this feels comfortable or even comforting as Pope John Paul II, who has died, is mourned and a new Pope is chosen by election of the Cardinals from among their own ranks.  The ritual of the black and white smoke – black if no new pope has been chosen, white when one finally is – is explained by newscasters so that, for those in the audience who are new to the ritual, they can understand it.  Benedict is the “conservative” candidate choice, while Bergoglio is pitted against him, something that some sources see as an invented controversy, but it is one that foreshadows the action.  The action is also foreshadowed by the location of the vote – it takes place, as it always does, in the Sistine Chapel.

Benedict and Bergoglio are both Cardinals at the beginning of the film.  Much has been made of Francis being the first Jesuit Pope, and there is a very good reason a Pope has never been a Jesuit before.  To become a Pope, you have to be a Cardinal, to become a Cardinal, you have to become a Bishop.  To become a bishop, well, you have to nominated.  When Ignatius Loyola started the Jesuits, he recruited very smart and capable men to serve in his order, an order that he dedicated to education.  The Church, badly in need of the reformation that Loyola and others were putting in place – in part in response to the protestant movement started by Luther - had many priests who were marginally competent.  The Pope saw that Loyola had many good priests in his order and asked Loyola to nominate a few to become Bishops so that the church could get healthier.  Loyola told the Pope he would get back to him about that.

When Loyola did get back to him, he told the Pope that giving him priests to become Bishops would not be in the best interests of the order, and therefore would not be good for the “Greater Glory of God,” or “Magus”, and he refused.  They were Loyola's priests, so the Pope couldn’t override him, but he was furious, and the Jesuits are the only order that have to swear their fealty to the Pope as part of their ordination.  And they are the only order that almost never lets one of their priests become a Bishop.  It is considered bad form within the order to promote oneself – one would only get “promoted” to being a Bishop if the head of the order tapped you – and that tap almost never comes.

After Benedict is installed, we fast forward seven years and Bergoglio is more and more disaffected with the Church and with his role as a Cardinal in it.  He wants to step down and sends letters to the Pope requesting the opportunity to talk about this, but they are never answered.  Frustrated, he books a flight to see Benedict, even though he hasn’t been invited, and then finds out that Benedict does now want to see him.  (The plot, including this bit, from here forward is apparently all constructed, though most of the historical material about their lives referred to in the dialogue between the two turns out to be reasonably factual).

When Bergoglio arrives in Rome, he makes his way to the Pope’s summer castle and makes his case to retire and return to being a parish priest.  As he does this he talks about why being an Archbishop feels more and more out of step with his own experience of what he has been called to do by God.  Benedict refuses to accept his resignation.  Benedict explains that his resignation would be seen as a rebuke of Benedict and all that he stands for.  And we have heard that this is the case.  Bergoglio has a rebuttal, frequently with a scripture quote attached, to every statement that Benedict makes about what the Church is becoming.  We get it that Bergoglio is a malcontent and his leaving would be experienced by many as a moral condemnation of the Pope and of the church as a whole.  But we also resonate with his plain speaking style and the scripture passages that he quotes.

After an afternoon spent in the garden arguing, Benedict retires to eat alone, as he always does.  Bergoglio “joins” him by eating alone as well.  They then get together for social time.  They look for interests they might have in common.  Bergoglio loves soccer, but Benedict has no taste for it.  Finally Benedict entertains Bergoglio by playing the piano.  Benedict catches Bergoglio out by pretending not to know the cultural significance of the Abbey Road studio where he once made a recording.  There is a sense of play and a sense of two men getting to know each other.  Bergoglio brings the letter with him, but Benedict ignores it and refuses to talk about it.  He does encourage Bergoglio, though, to tell him about how he came to the Church, and Bergoglio talks about his love for a woman, Maria, and the fated calling that he heard, and how he joined the Jesuits and warmly describes his relationship with his formation director.

Meanwhile, Benedict is embroiled in a scandal having to do with leaked papers about the papal finances.  His chief minister in charge of finances is arrested.  Benedict is called back to Rome and Bergoglio joins him in his helicopter.  There is more playful play between them and some disapproving glances from Bergoglio about the trappings of wealth and power that go along with being Pope.

On arrival, Benedict asks to meet with Bergoglio in the Sistine Chapel.   This is an incredible place for them to meet.  It is, as we know from the beginning of the film, the place where Popes are elected.  It is also one of the great artworks in history – Michelangelo’s ceiling is a masterpiece.  So much so that it overshadows the great frescoes on the walls by other giants of the renaissance.  And there is a tension between the walls and the ceiling that mirror the tension between Benedict and Bergoglio.

The frescoes on the walls connect the stories of the Old Testament to Jesus, clearly making the case for Jesus as God’s chosen one, the Messiah.  They then go on to show Jesus handing the keys of the kingdom to Peter and from him, the first Pope, to all the Popes that follow.  This is the pictorial proof that the Pope speaks as the leader of the one “Catholic and apostolic church” that was referred to in the Nicene creed that I recited as a child in the Episcopal church.

 The ceiling, though, is a celebration of Human Beings in all of his and her glory as an incarnation of God.  And the first man is made, front and center, in God's image.  The ceiling speaks to the humanity of every one of us – and points out our failings, our weaknesses – the things for which we will be damned – and our triumphs – including the very earthy bodies that are on display.  The ceiling is a celebration of the glory of the diverse individuals we are, each in a powerful reflection of some aspect of the creator.  The ceiling is about the actions of humans, what they have made of themselves – not what they have inherited.

Benedict calls Bergoglio here to this sacred space to tell him a secret.  A secret that Bergoglio must keep.   The secret is that the Pope will step down – not unprecedented – it happened 900 years ago – and he would like Bergoglio to take over for him.  Now this is a grand and, I think, fantasy laden moment.  First of all, Benedict can’t appoint his successor.  We started the movie with the process.  But more importantly, Benedict, before he was Pope, was a man, Ratzinger; a lifelong scholar from Germany, who is so deeply embedded in an authoritarian mindset that this would be a true reformation for him as a person.

The movie proposes that Benedict has, indeed, changed.  Benedict lets Bergoglio know that he is planning to step down and, in a reversal of roles, Bergoglio tells him that he can’t do this.  The Papacy is, he says, bigger than a person.  He says it is Benedict’s job to stay in the Church.  He is mimicking back some of the objections that Benedict was offering him 24 hours earlier.  But Benedict is insistent – and insistent that Bergoglio take on the Papacy himself.

Bergoglio begs off.  He can’t do it.  He was the head of the Jesuits in Argentina during the “Dirty War”, which was a rule by a ruthless military junta in which many people were “disappeared” – they were killed and dropped from airplanes flying high enough over the seas that their remains were destroyed on impact.  One of Bergoglio’s chemistry professors was disappeared, despite his efforts.  More personally damning, he renounced two priests, including his formation director, when they refused to follow his and the junta’s orders to shut down a collective for the poor.  Without the protection of the church, the now ex-priests were tortured.  Bergoglio, meanwhile, to protect the rest of the Jesuits, was seen as colluding with the junta.

When Benedict asks about the outcome of all of this, Bergoglio acknowledges that he has done penance by serving as a parish priest for ten years, and that his formation director has forgiven him and performed mass with him, but acknowledges that the other priest has not and he feels deeply guilty about his actions.  Benedict offers him absolution.

About this time, the tourists come into the chapel.  Benedict and Bergoglio beat a hasty retreat into the sacristy.  There they continue their discussion.  Benedict states that he no longer hears God.  He also notes that he reassigned a known pedophilic priest to new parishes after it was discovered that he was molesting children in one place – inflicting him, in the process, on other children and Bergoglio is horrified. Benedict formally asks Bergoglio to hear his confession.  He starts, but then we don’t hear all of it as his voice fades.  There are, I guess, some things we just shouldn’t hear…

The high point in the film, for me, then occurs.  Bergoglio and Benedict emerge from the sacristy and the gruff and retiring Pope Benedict is immersed in a sea of people, people who adore him and want to take selfies with him.  He embraces this, under the watchful eye of Bergoglio who protects Benedict from his underlings who would whisk him off to his next duties.  We then see the coronation of Bergoglio as Francis, who refuses the Red Papal cape and Shoes as he makes his way to greet the world, saying the carnival is over.  A year later, the two Popes are seen together sharing the joy and agony of watching Germany defeat Argentina in the world cup.

As much as I think this film does not portray the truth of what happened between Benedict and Bergoglio, it does portray what should have happened.  And it portrays a shift in an institution that has seemed hopelessly mired in institutional muck and completely divorced from the congregation it was created to serve.  It portrays a sea change – but I think that institutional inertia is likely to turn that into a bit of a shift rather than an about face.  We will see how long one man’s vision can inform the formation of an institution.

I think the film offers a tremendously charitable view of Benedict.  It portrays him as someone who is aware of his shortcomings – and is able to not only acknowledge them but to embrace someone with a seemingly opposite view – but one that he can see is based on a devout and true vision of the church – one that he, an isolated and very smart boy – was never able to achieve within himself or the church he shepherded, but one that he, too, would like to participate in.  But Benedict did not believe he would change his own spots to be the leader – someone else would have to lead with a vision that he acknowledged to be superior but could not live.

If this is anything like what happened, then Benedict belongs in that rare and small class of people – a class that Dora Maria Tellez in Nicaragua pointed out includes George Washington and Nelson Mandela – people who worked hard to acquire power and then worked equally hard to walk away from it. A very small class of people who are able to see the office as greater than themselves.  Based on this film, Benedict is every bit the leader that Francis is.  Of course, it is also the case that Benedict was embroiled in scandal and needed to get himself and the Church out from under it.  There may have been no other way to do that than to resign.  But in so far as even a part of him realized the opportunity to have a leader like Bergoglio take the reins of the institution is true, that is a testament to a very impressive legacy – one that also includes all of those things that he confessed to and that we couldn’t hear – and those that we could.

This film, then, is a story not just of two Popes, but of two remarkable men.  Men who have worked to achieve power, but also recognize that the purpose of the power is for a greater good – and that the path towards that good is one that can best be trod by following in the footsteps of Christ, the person from whom they have inherited the keys.  Together they are portrayed as uniting the seemingly disparate depictions of the Sistine chapel.  They respect the legacy that they together share enough to have it reflect what it is that they and the congregations they lead can aspire to becoming.  Even given that the path towards this action is certainly less clear than the movie portrays it to be, this vision should give us pause – and hope – that we can, at least for moments, transcend those forces that would prevent us becoming who we might be.

The film is also based, from a psychoanalytic perspective then, on the ability of an ego ideal - a beacon of truth - to keep us oriented.  Though Benedict and Bergoglio have very different visions of the Church, they share a love of God - and of the idealized Son of God.  It is this idealized vision - one that is depicted perhaps most movingly on the front wall of the Sistine Chapel, in the form of Christ separating the sinners from the saints in the Last Judgement, that perhaps brings these men together.  They are, like all of us, fallen.  They have committed not just small sins, but big ones in the process of navigating their lives.  These sins have been shaped by who they are and have shaped who they have become.  And yet, this movie maintains, it is possible for them - and by inference us - to rise above our ourselves - above who it is that we have been - and to radically revision ourselves.  Though the analyst in me thinks that process is more complex and difficult than the one depicted here, there is something miraculous about the power of the ideal to move us.

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here. 

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), just enter your email in the subscribe by email box to the right of the text.