The Curious Case of Coleman Silk

Movies have enriched our lives with such a wealth of stories and characters, behind which talented writers, directors and actors operate like drivers behind the wheel.  By and large, it is all fiction, but to the extent that movies as an art form can illuminate things about ourselves, each other, and the world around us, then they serve a very real purpose.  This week I look at three curious characters, who, in each case, figure in the profound human drama that they inhabit and define.

  

The Human Stain is a Robert Benton film, adapted from a Philip Roth novel, and while critics were lukewarm at best, I saw it as an American tragedy that Anthony Hopkins as Coleman Silk, Nicole Kidman as Faunia Farley, and Gary Sinise as Nathan Zuckerman pull off deftly and powerfully.  The curious love affair between Silk and Farley may be the centerpiece that Benton chose, but the engine that drives the story is a tectonic secret that Silk grew to wear like second skin over his life.

You see, Silk is African American, but unlike his parents, brother and sister, his skin color is so fair that he can, and does, pass as White.  As a Jewish man, in fact.  Silk is a rising talent in the boxing ring as an older adolescent, and his coach encourages him to apply to the University of Pittsburgh and advises him not to mention that he was "colored."  This advice still echoing in his ears, he completes an application to the Navy by checking off the box for "White."

Much later in life, Silk is an esteemed Classics professor, and in taking attendance for one lecture, he wonders if two students who haven't attended a single class five weeks into the course were "spooks."  Silk meant the term as ghost or specter, but when those very students caught wind of his remark, they filed a grievance for racism.  Not so much common nowadays, "spook" is a derogatory term for an African American.

Silk flies off in a rage, abruptly ending a private conference with the college dean and her senior faculty.  He is fully aware of the secondary meanings of the word, but he asks his colleagues how can he possibly have meant "spook" to be a racist insult when he hadn't even laid eyes on those students.  He didn't know that they were African Americans.  But when his inquisitors try to get him to acknowledge the students' complaint, he simply will not hear any of it.

The unfortunate irony of this testy conference, as the story will unfold, is that the dean and faculty do not really know why Silk is so furious.  If they only knew that he himself was African American, then maybe they'd have a much different perspective on the whole grievance.  Yet, decades into a racial and religious lie, Silk doesn't even come close to unveiling that lie to save his professorship and reputation.

This irony is more complex, however.  We may very well believe that Silk didn't mean "spooks" to be racist.  But his flat disavowal of his own race is a kind of reverse racism.  Some Filipinos, for comparison, are ashamed of their own heritage, and prefer to assimilate wholesale into American culture, for instance, and adopt an American (i.e., White) demeanor, mindset and lifestyle.  I know, my family and I were like that.  As for The Human Stain, we'd probably have good ground to stand on in viewing Silk as a closet racist.

Why does Silk disavow his race?  The easy response is, because, ever so fair complexioned, he can.  But the next response is telling:  He simply doesn't identify with "We, the Negro People."  I imagine that some of us are like that:  We don't fashion our identity according to nationality, race or ethnicity.  We don't feel beholden to a particular group, despite the fact that society in general and our family in particular may expect us to feel so.

Consider this exchange between Silk as an adolescent and his mother:

Mrs. Silk: You need to be proud of your race.

Silk: What about me? What about just being proud of being me? It's my life.

Further:

Mrs. Silk: Funny I never thought of you as black or white. Gold, you were my golden child.

The family is clearly a proud African American family, and modeled after Mr. and Mrs. Silk's values, the children are bright, earnest and hardworking.  So as they catch wind of how Silk poses as a White Jew, they aren't just perplexed but also hurt.

While a university student, Silk meets, and falls in love, with Steena Paulsson:

Silk: So, that's an... What is it? Swedish?

Paulsson: Close, it's Danish and Icelandic.

As the couple feel more intimate and comfortable with one another, and want to spend the rest of their lives together, Silk invites her to meet his family.  He is still early in his racial and religious lie, and may have thought that his girlfriend and mother in particular would navigate the apparent differences between them just fine.  But no.  Upon their meeting at the door and together at the dining table, neither Paulsson nor Mrs. Silk could disavow the very fact of race.  It quietly shocked both of them, that each was of a race that neither one expected.

Paulsson, sullen and tearful on their train ride back to the university, confesses that she cannot deal with this.  The racial difference may not have been a major issue for her.  But the fabricated front that was her boyfriend, plus the lingering aftershock over family dinner, must've told her right away that this intimate, comfortable relationship was anything but that. 

It was a very painful lesson learned for Coleman Silk, but the lesson wasn't the right one:  Instead of unveiling his lie, or even acknowledging his African American identity, he redoubles his efforts to pass off as a White man.  His father already dead, he has been telling others that his parents were dead, and in a cruel bit of conversation, shares his fact with his mother.  Deeply hurt, she wonders aloud what he was going to do, if he and his future wife were to raise a family and their children were dark-skinned.  Further, she paints a sorrowful scenario where he wouldn't allow their children and her to see each other:  He'd make her stay inside the train station and sit by a window, where he'd walk by with her grandchildren.

Mrs. Silk: Coleman, you think like a prisoner. You're white as snow, and you think like a slave.

Wise motherly words.

Shame and hatred must've become more powerful, pernicious drivers for that lie, until that reverse racism coursed so deeply in Silk and defined who he was as a man. 

Religion as Ongoing Explanatory Model

What Sam Harris is saying, I think, is that religion was our explanatory model for things that happened which we could not understand.  But as we evolved, gained more experience and knowledge, and built sophisticated tools, science became our go-to frame of reference.  To say that religion, now or then, is indicative of science failing to explain something is curious, however.  Scientific failure is a plausible enough way of putting it, but I prefer to acknowledge that science can carry us quite far, but only so far, beyond which other viable explanatory models must come it (rf. The Tripartite Model).  So science doesn't so much fail, as it meets its limits with certain phenomena and in certain contexts.

Harris' point about the wide diversity of religious belief, practice and terminology is a good caution not to pin religion down as meaning one, and only one, thing.  But he must be very careful not to suggest that Islam, in particular, is a religion of Holy Wars and of combat and death in certain contexts, which is the highest obligation for Muslims.  Islamic scholars and Muslim practitioners can speak to this much better than I can, but Islam is a religion of peace.  But like Christianity, people can commandeer the religion to justify a destructive or military purpose (rf. English kings who fought wars in the name of God). 

Religion for Understanding Beyond Physical

In keeping with my preceding article Religion is Crucial for Understanding People, let's look at more issues and insights on religion, especially as it is an integral area in The Tripartite Model.

Question: As a "bright," what do you believe?

James Randi: The term "bright" I don't much care for, but hey, we did the best we could with it. I was with Richard Dawkins in Clearwater, Florida and a few other people who brainstormed and came up with idea of having the "brights." I think I was maybe the third or fourth person to sign the membership roster. And a "bright" is someone who thinks logically and rationally; bases his or her decisions on rationality, upon logic, and upon evidence—that's the major thing right there. And if we don't have evidence, we can express our belief or lack of belief in it, but it has to be provisional. I believe that this is probably true, though I don't have any evidence for or against. It's a perfectly safe statement. And so, brights base all of their decisions and their beliefs on logic, rationality, and evidence. That's the thing in which they differ from the average person who takes anything that comes along that looks attractive. "Oh, I like that; I think I'll believe in it."

Question: As the scientific picture of the universe gets weirder, could any religious claims ever be verified?

James Randi: Not that I know. I am an atheist, tried and true. I have been since I was, oh I guess about this tall. I'm only about this tall now. And I made up my mind that I was going to investigate all of these things and question them. I went to Sunday school. I was tossed out of Sunday school immediately. But it gave me 25 cents that I could have put in the contribution plate there, so when they pass the plate around, and I found out that at Purdy's Drug Store, you could buy a two-flavored ice cream sundae for 25 cents. And that was a great discovery of my childhood, I must say, and I took full advantage of it.
My parents, bless them, never found out and I went off every Sunday morning as if going to Sunday school, but I lied. And I'm ashamed to admit it now, and if my dad and mom are up there someplace, or down there someplace, I have no idea, I ask them to forgive me.

What James Randi speaks to in the first part resonates quite well with my views à la Theory of Algorithms and The Tripartite Model.  It's about adopting a curious, questioning approach to knowing, grasping and solving things.  What is the evidence? is akin to my more epistemic phrasing How do we know what we know?  While some of us will do what Randi acknowledges, namely, believe wholesale what we run into, I encourage us to step back a bit, think it about some, and then believe or not believe accordingly.

In the second part, however, I beg to differ with Randi.  Investigating or questioning things doesn't necessarily make people an atheist, although evidently it is true for him.  The question of evidence and verification vis-a-vis religion is a complex one. Science is founded on empiricism, which is essentially about seeking to understand via our senses: sight, sound, scent, taste and touch.  If we can see it, hear it, or hold it in our hands somehow, then whatever it is, it is a real phenomenon.

But not everything about ourselves, the world around us, and the broader cosmos is material or tangible, and therefore to rely exclusively on an analytic frame of reference (i.e., science) and to seek truth mainly via evidence (i.e., empiricism) is necessarily to limit our knowledge and understanding.  If, on the other hand, we allow ourselves the notion of a different sort of evidence, that is, one beyond the material or the empirical, then we pave the way for verification.

Take the thoughtful, wonderful TV series `Joan of Arcadia.  Joan is a high schooler who, much to her consternation and confusion at first, finds that she can talk with God.  Cleverly, the writer brings God to her in the guise of everyday people she may encounter at school, in the streets, or at parties.  One time God was a cute fellow high schooler, and as they walked to the park, Joan demanded that he prove he truly was God by creating a miracle.  He pointed to a tree.  'That's just a tree' was her dismissive retort.  No one else can really make a tree was his comeback.

The scientific method is arguably the best way to grasp our physical, material world, but it falls short otherwise.  I haven't fully figured this out yet, but I argue that we have to rely on the religious method, such as faith, belief and miracle, to grasp and thus verify the non-physical and non-material.

Religion for Understanding People Better

Theory of Algorithms is a conceptual framework for knowing, understanding and solving things more effectively, and The Tripartite Model is a structured guide for doing these.  Religion is part of it all, as you see below.  It's a general term I use to encompass (a) any formal religion we may espouse across humankind and also (b) any endeavor having to do with spirituality, purpose and fate, belief and faith, philosophy, even metaphysics and transcendence.  While Science is about rational or analytic and Art about non-rational or intuitive, Religion is about meta-rational and spiritual.  Sometimes what we encounter is mysterious, inscrutable or miraculous: Religion helps us come to grips with these things. 

Not everyone is religious, spiritual or philosophic, of course, and some of us prefer to draw mainly on analytic or intuitive perspectives for knowing, understanding and solving things.  Some may even scoff outright at any notion of religion.  But I argue that to grasp ourselves, the world around us, and the broadest universe fully, we must draw on something like the Tripartite Model.  

That said, my articles this week look at issues and insights on religion.  Big Think is one of the best forums for a wide range of ideas and information, and while it's decidedly logical, rational and analytic in perspective, I am intrigued about how the broad area of science tackles religion.  I weigh in on such tackling.

Religion is really made by the brain, it's a secretion of the brain...  The brain creates religion, the brain consumes religion [i.e., neurologically].

There are 4200 religions in the world, each of them believing that they're absolutely correct and everyone should follow their views. No one has any evidence of the stories behind the religions.

We got interested in this massive unreality, which is in fact finally a real reality, namely, religion.

When my mother died last year, the priest and many in attendance at her funeral mass believed that she was now in the eternal life with God.  Privately I said to myself that none of us really know that.  But it was a very real belief in that Catholic church gathering, and it allayed the grief at losing my mother.  I very much allow for that possibility, that is, of the everlasting and the infinite, while wondering about, questioning and challenging how we come to believe what we believe, especially about the after-life. 

It makes sense, from a scientific viewpoint, that practicing religion is akin to going to a spa, getting a massage, or going for a walk, that is, in its effects on our brain.  While there are some wealthy people for whom luxury treatment is a sort of religion, I can hear devout practitioners taking umbrage at what Lionel Tiger relates.  But I agree with him:  Religion must've helped people at my mother's funeral come to grips with the thought of death, and it must've soothed them from that frightening specter. 

This brings me to some working arguments:

• God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and almighty, while religion is a human-made set of beliefs, practices and community, which are inevitably imperfect and limited.  
• How God fits into religion is a complex, intricate phenomenon, but the two are distinct and one doesn't necessarily require or imply the other.  
• At the same time, some people do equate God and religion as essentially the same:  To go to church, for example, is to follow God.

Much as some may scoff at religion, the fact that millions and millions of people around the world believe in it, practice it, and abide by it means, to Tiger's point, that this is no small or casual phenomena.  While some may say more bluntly that religion is a delusion, myth or farce, it is indeed a very real human reality.  It is no fantasy or fabrication that, again to Tiger's point, invests ungodly sums of money into religion, erects edifices of worship, and advances a strict edict of conduct.  It is indeed a real unreality and a real reality. 

So even if we have just a smattering of interest in truly understanding ourselves, each other, and our broader community across the world, then we cannot, I argue, dismiss religion in the way I position it in The Tripartite Model.  Some of us can certainly choose to dismiss religion, even after all these points, but they necessarily limit their understanding.

Natural Disasters are (Essentially) Human-made

Many years ago I taught courses on stress at Northwestern University.  It covered the nature, causes and experience of stress: from biological and psychological effects, to war trauma and natural disasters.  I remember that one of my students was a veteran, and in reference to what we were reading, he acknowledged that fighting felt exhilarating to him, at least at times.  The stress of the battlefields wasn't categorically unpleasant, was it.

As a professor, I wanted to make sure that students adopted the fundamentals and grasped the principles of whatever we were studying.  But in addition, I wanted to challenge their conventional wisdom and to offer alternative perspectives, if only to provoke their thinking, deepen their insight, and expand their horizons.

So besides the counter-intuitive experience of war, I also suggested that severe natural phenomena, such as earthquakes, tornadoes and floods, were essentially human-made.

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Imagine a time many millennia ago, before the advent of humankind - the origin of homo sapiens dates back 200,000 years - the kind of damage that any severe natural phenomenon heaved was probably minimal.  For one thing, human population was nowhere near 7 billion people.  For another thing, that far back was before the advent of cities, roadways and structures.  A massive storm, earthquake or eruption must've caused severe damage to animal populations and altered landscapes.

To my point in our courses, however, I bet that sparse, scattered human populations back then missed quite a lot of these natural disasters.  But as our population grew, and civilizations rose up, and sophistication heightened, we built our lives on the premise that the ground we stood on were flat and still.  That premise was perfectly fine the vast majority of time, but when that very ground roiled in one way or another, then disaster struck, injury and death occurred, and stress and trauma cropped up like so many cases for healthcare professionals. 

I am neither denying nor diminishing the role Mother Nature plays in these disasters.  But consider the tsunami that crashed ashore on Fukushima in northeast Japan in 2011.  If the destruction it caused on any city life in its path weren't tragic enough, the fact that a nuclear facility was on that path raised the level of destruction, and the ensuing tragedy, some incalculable fold.  Mother Nature built neither the city nor the facility.

There is no fault or blame here.  Rather, my point, as it was for my students, is that there is a complex, intimate relationship between natural phenomena and humankind.  Our growth, migration, and construction all play an integral part of natural disasters.  Mother Nature will do whatever she pleases, whenever and wherever she pleases.  But again the lives we have built on her landscape, the beliefs we harbor, and the experiences we face are, I argue, the defining hallmarks of disaster and stress.

The Earth is (Essentially) Still

Over dinner one time, I asked my daughter how fast the was earth moving.  At that moment, it certainly didn't feel to us as if the earth moved at all.  Instead of Googling the answer, we decided to apply what she had learned in math to figure out the orbiting speed of the earth.

First, we drew on a common formula to determine the circumference of a circle: C = 2πr (two times pi times radius).  The earth doesn't actually orbit in a perfect circle around the sun, but for the sake of this illustration let's assume that orbit is perfect.  Because we know the distance between the earth and the sun is approximately 93 million miles, we can plug this figure (radius) into the formula, and we get an orbiting distance of 558,000,000 miles. 

Second, we know that it takes 365 days for the earth to revolve completely around the sun, which translates to 8760 hours.  Using another formula that my daughter knew: distance = speed x time, we came up with a whopping orbiting speed of 64,000 MPH.   

We are literally hurtling in space at such a phenomenal speed, everyone of us!

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By comparison, consider the following:

• A race car can travel 220 MPH
• A commercial airplane travels at 500 MPH
• The speed of sound is less than 800 MPH
• The turbojet Concorde flies at 1400 MPH
• An Apollo spacecraft travels at 25,000 MPH 

None of these come close to how fast we can move through space, simply by sitting at the dinner table.  By the way, Wikipedia notes that our orbiting speed is 67,000 MPH, even faster than what our rough calculation determined.

We got on this subject, I believe, because my daughter wondered why we had earthquakes, weather fronts, and wind, and I explained that in general it was because the earth was in constant motion.  There were also all sorts of pressure on and beneath the surface, and this energy contributed to natural phenomena and disasters. 

Yet, there is such stability and quiet to the earth's movement that none of us can feel a speed of 67,000 MPH.  More specifically, I think, the earth is hardwired in our mind and body as a fundamental frame of reference for motion.  It is as if we have habituated to that phenomenal speed, over generations and generations, because of that hardwiring.  I argue that what lends that unmistakable feeling of being still at the dinner table is habituation + reference.

Imagine hopping on any of the fast-moving vehicles above, and we immediately compare the ride to our frame of reference (speed zero, if you will), and we can easily feel the motion and speed.

The Earth is (Essentially) Flat

Before Pythagoras in 6th century BC, many people believed that the earth was flat.  It's such common knowledge now, two and a half millennia later, that we don't even think about it twice.  Pragmatically speaking, however, I argue that we often experience the earth as flat and that it is better for us to live and work as if it were flat.  Mathematically I can offer an argument that in essence the earth is flat to us.

Imagine flying off into in outer space, several hundreds of miles away from earth.  Imagine, then, flying back closer and closer, until we're back on terra firma.

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Notice how earth essentially flattens as we approach closer and as we land back on solid ground.  (Sure, there are curves, rolling surfaces, hills and mountains:  The earth is not a perfectly smooth sphere.  In fact, it's more of an oblate spheroid, extending out some from the equator.)

In our day-to-day lives, from how we construct our houses and buildings, to how we walk from place to place, we don't see these things and ourselves as situated on a big ball (i.e., something round).  Instead we see it all as if we were on cardboard or plywood (i.e., something flat).  If in fact we were to imagine being on that big ball, we would be concerned about toppling over or rolling off.

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Occasionally I ask my friends to define a line in terms of a circle.  Many are nowhere near as geeky as I am, so they're bemused at best and stumped at worst.  It's this:  A line is a circle with infinite radius.  Similarly a plane is a sphere with infinite radius.  This is part of my mathematical argument:  You see, our size as an individual vis-a-vis the earth is very tiny.  In other words, the earth, compared to each of us, is of such massive heft, so as to be essentially infinite in its radius and thus essentially a plane (i.e., flat) to us.  This size difference is what flattens the earth as we return from outer space back on solid ground.