Defense Against the Dark Arts
Part I
It has been a tough season—this winter on the wane. Few of us have escaped the churning.
Global calamities on a massive scale reflect and are affected by our own teeming conflicts here in the States, as war wages on in Ukraine and in Gaza, taking thousands of innocent lives, and as civil order breaks down in Haiti. Those of you who are alums, members of the faculty or staff, or current students at Harvard, know that our school (beloved to many of us) has been under intense scrutiny and even assault from many directions for months. Speaking with colleagues and alumni in various contexts this season, I have heard echoes of the heavy questions I have been carrying: How could an institution that once felt Rock of Gibraltar solid have crumbled so rapidly and dramatically from outside pressure? How could our newly inaugurated president, heralded as a heroic dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences during one of the greatest crises in our university’s history— the Covid-19 pandemic— have been ousted so unceremoniously by the Board that hired her? How could our campus communities have turned against themselves by engaging in protests and individual actions that got out of hand, and by posting awful antisemitic images and comments on social media? How could outside sources of influence — political and financial — worsen that internal conflict and kneecap the institution? How could the aims of seeking diversity of background, openness of opportunity, and acceptance into community be flattened and caricatured such that “DEI” has been turned into a catch-all acronym much like the now tarnished “CRT”? Whose purpose does it serve when those of us who say we are for dignity, love, and justice, devote precious time and treasure to ripping each other apart? The enemy, which I will name as a rising authoritarianism, does not sleep while we fight.
(An aside: Some of you may be wondering about it, so I will briefly share my opinion here about that now infamous congressional hearing in December. Claudine Gay denounced the hateful scourge of antisemitism at times during the hearing and in other contexts before it occurred. In the clip that has circulated ad infinitum in which she gives a legalistic answer to a question about students calling for the genocide of Jews, she was asked specifically about university policy and told to respond with “yes or no” even though there was a great deal of subtext behind the question such as what kind of language counts as “calling for genocide.” (There is disagreement about the meaning of certain phrases, and, just for the record, Claudine Gay had issued a statement to the university community expressing her personal distaste for the phrase “from the river to the sea.”). This question posed at the hearing was a rhetorical trap set by a cynical politician, and it worked. I will also say, for those who are wondering about my views on the plagiarism issue, that unlike the president of Stanford, whose research violations were investigated by his university over months, Dr. Gay was not afforded the respect of a formal review of the charges against her before she was forced out within a couple of weeks. She was tried in the court of social media memes and public opinion, which often connected her reputed failings to her race, cruelly caricaturing her as the monstrous poster child of a made-up boogeyman, “DEI,” and boogeywoman, “CRT.” Anyone who has worked with Claudine knows that she is a lovely person. We are all human. We all make mistakes. We all deserve grace.)
As I watched all of this unfold with my heart in my throat, I kept thinking back to the book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by the Yale historian Timothy Snyder, which I listened to during the isolationist phase of Covid-19. One of Snyder’s chapters details how institutions are targets during the rise of authoritarian regimes and suggests that one form of proactive defense is to strengthen institutions before political crisis occurs. It is too late for that advance preparation at Harvard (or at Penn), but it is not too late to reexamine all of our university policies, operations, and principles, identifying weak spots with clear eyes and attempting to caulk and correct them together. Cultural institutions with educational influence seem to be on the front lines of an ultra-conservative onslaught. Public libraries are already under sustained attack too, from book bans and purges. Museums may well be next. If you work at a museum, please examine for leaks and batten your hatches now.
Like many other folks, I am worried about how the U.S. presidential election in November will heighten societal splintering and slingshot us farther down the road of democratic decline. It is, in fact, authoritarian creep that I am configuring as “the dark arts” in this post. (Here, I have Masha Gessen in my head, from their YouTube talks and book Surviving Autocracy, that I also listened to during the Covid tunnel.) While we are arguing about college presidents and DEI programs, Donald Trump is boosting Russia’s president and hosting Hungary’s prime minister. The feeling of powerlessness, of watching a train about to wreck around the bend, is excruciating. But in truth, we are not powerless. We have our voices and our votes. And we have the ability to care for each other.
One of the ways I know best for doing this care work is through exchanging thoughtful words. In November I read a glorious essay about aging, light, and shadow by one of my favorite writers, Anne Lamott. Taking as an example the work of the nineteenth-century painter Albert Bierstadt (whose name I did not know, but whose style I recognized when I saw it in her piece), Lamott showed how his western nature scenes filtered light into dark corners where animals tended to dwell. “No matter how low you are, the light can reach you. It falls on animals, including us. This is positively biblical,” she wrote. Much is murky in this moment, but like houseplants in dim winter kitchens, we must bend toward the light.
Last month I received a private message from a Carrying Capacity reader (and a scholar of African American and Native American histories). She said that my newsletter posts had been comforting and inspiring over the past year and that she wanted to share a bit of inspiration of her own. She sent a video of the trench she and her partner had dug in their yard during Northern California’s harrowing atmospheric river storms. The trench was a protective measure, meant to catch excess water and channel it away from their home. In the storm’s aftermath, the trench had transformed into a beautiful rivulet with the character of a natural stream. Adversity joined to creativity had birthed something beautiful. I love that story. Her act of passing it on lifted my spirits. We really do live in an emotional and psychological archipelago, an island chain of moods. By sharing experiences and ideas, we can provide each other with necessary reprieves. This is what I mean by the work of caretaking. So grab your shovels.
If you’d like to check out my latest work, here’s an article I wrote in the Atlantic on how the novelist Octavia Butler foresaw many of the entangled crises we’re facing.
And here's a review I just published in the New York Times on Emily Raboteau’s new climate memoir, Lessons for Survival.
Thank you so much for this keenly insightful message, Tiya. You have always had such an incredible gift for the courage to tell the truth, even in spaces where the truth has been forgotten -- even in spaces where it has been forgotten on purpose. Thank you for bravely continuing to show us the light and remind us to bend toward it -- this is deeply needed.
This is the perfect bedtime reading. I feel calm and hopeful — such gifts these days. “Adversity joined to creativity had birthed something beautiful.”