Good evening, everyone.
I'm David Hempton, dean of
the Harvard Divinity School.
It's my pleasure to welcome
you to Sanders Theater,
and to introduce
the annual Ingersoll
Lecture on Immortality,
and not immorality
as it appeared on our
program several years ago.
And that got attention
to the Divinity School.
And each year at the
beginning of the lecture,
it's been our custom to explain
the Ingersoll endowment,
and to thank our generous donor,
Carolyn Haskell-Ingersoll.
Tonight however, in order to
free as much time as possible
for the lecture itself, we
have printed the information
about the Ingersoll lecture,
found in the program.
So I encourage you to
read it, and to reflect
that while the Ingersoll
endowment does not in itself
guarantee immortality,
it has lasted
for well over a century,
which is at least
a step in the right direction.
So as I say, if immortality
is on your mind,
a Harvard endowment, especially
to the Divinity School
is definitely the way to go.
[LAUGHING]
Tonight's distinguished speaker,
or the acclaimed novelist
and poet, Russell
Banks, is the latest
in a long line of
internationally renowned
scholars, writers, and
public intellectuals
who have come to Harvard to
give the Ingersoll lecture.
The list includes William
James, as the second presenter,
Josiah Royce, Howard Thurman,
Paul Tilak, Alfred North
Whitehead, Victor Turner, Martin
Marty, Caroline Walker Bynum,
[INAUDIBLE],, and
our last lecturer,
Toni Morrison, who spoke to us
rivetingly and unforgettably
from this stage on the
subject of goodness, altruism,
and the literary imagination.
This evening we have
the honor of hearing
from another very distinguished
and award winning writer.
Russell Banks
reflect on the theme
of immortality, which,
let's be honest,
is not a subject much
discussed at Harvard.
Russell Banks has
chosen as his topic,
Feeding Moloch, the
Sacrifice of Children
on the Altar of Capitalism.
So it's now my pleasure to call
in my good friend and colleague
in the faculty of Divinity,
Professor David Carrasco,
to introduce this
evening's speaker.
David, who is
himself, a wonderfully
imaginative scholar,
writer, and teacher,
is a Neil L.
Rudenstine professor
of the study of Latin America
with a joint appointment
in the department
of anthropology
in the faculty of
arts and sciences.
David's influence and
work reaches extensively
across schools and
disciplines of Harvard,
but also goes beyond academia.
He is a recipient of the Mexican
order of the Aztec Eagle,
the highest honor the
Mexican government
gives to a foreign national.
And this year he was honored
as the University of Chicago's
alumnus of the year.
It was David's idea, along
with our wonderful colleague,
Stephanie Paulsell, to turn
the annual Ingersoll lecture
into a semester-long
set of workshops
culminating in tonight's event.
Earlier today, and I know
many of you were there,
we had the final
workshop in this series
with Russell Banks
in attendance.
It's hard for me to capture
in words the depth and quality
of engagement with his writing
on display this afternoon.
Russell Banks himself
stated that one
of the sacred pleasures
he has as a writer
is the knowledge that somehow
a story he has created
makes a deep contact
with those who read,
but likely he will never meet.
Today we read and met, which
was an unusual pleasure.
This evening's
lecture is therefore
the culmination of
something very special
in the intellectual
life of Harvard.
So without further ado,
it's now my great pleasure
to call on my friend and
colleague, David Carrasco,
to introduce tonight's
distinguished speaker, Russell
Banks.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you, Dean Hempton.
Two years ago on this
stage, Toni Morrison
gave her Ingersoll
lecture entitled
"Goodness, Altruism, and
the Literary Imagination,"
a compelling lecture
with an arresting title,
surpassed only by the title
chosen for this year's
Ingersoll lecture.
Soon after Morrison's visit,
both Morrison and the Divinity
School, without the
other knowing it,
started thinking in the
same direction and about
the same person.
Toni decided to reissue her
Pulitzer Prize winning novel,
Beloved, and decided
that Russell Banks
would be the best
person to write
a new introduction to Beloved.
This was a very smart, perhaps
even provocative choice.
Why not a black writer?
Why not a woman, since Beloved
is very much a woman's story?
Why not an influential
literary critic?
Why Russell Banks, who
the Village Voice magazine
calls quote, "the most
important living white male
American on the
official literary map.
A writer we as
readers and writers
can actually learn from,
whose books help us
and urge us to change."
I have my own view of the
meaning of this choice,
but will let you, tonight's
audience, come up with your own
as you listen to Russell
Banks' powerful talk.
While Toni was
making this decision,
the Harvard Divinity School,
under the very smart leadership
of Dean David
Hempton, also began
thinking about Russell Banks
as the next Ingersoll lecturer.
Fortunately for us, Russell,
who is well known and well read
by a number of faculty
and students at Harvard,
accepted David
Hempton's invitation,
and chose for the title
of his Ingersoll lecture,
"Feeding Moloch, the
Sacrifice of Children
on the Altar of Capitalism."
Russell Banks was born
in Newton, Massachusetts,
and raised in relative poverty
in the small town of Barnstead,
New Hampshire,
before moving back
to Wakefield, Massachusetts
where he attended high school.
Banks grew up attending
New England Presbyterian
churches, which he
remarked somewhere,
provided a very great
explanation for greed.
He graduated from the
University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill with
honors, after co-founding
with William Matthews a small
literary publishing house
and magazine
entitled, Lillabulero.
The 1971 volume of the
best American short stories
included fiction by Banks.
In 1974 he published a volume
of poetry, Snow, Meditations
on a Cautious Man in Winter.
His next volume, a
collection of short stories,
called Searching for Survivors,
won an O. Henry Award.
A second collection of short
stories, The New World,
received acclaim
for its blending
of historical and
semi-autobiographical material.
banks was awarded a
Guggenheim fellowship in 1976.
And he says in a revealing
interview in the Paris Review
quote, "I had the
opportunity to take off
from teaching and travel
and live someplace
for a year and a half, and
instead of Italy or France
I went to Jamaica."
After living in
Jamaica and writing
the novel, The
Book of Jamaica, he
says, "I accepted and
was obliged for example,
to have African-American
friends.
I was obliged to
address deliberately
the overlapping social and
racial contexts of my life.
I'm a white man in a white
dominated, racialized society,
therefore, if I want to
I can live my whole life
in a racial fantasy.
Most white Americans
do just that," he says,
"because we can.
In a color-defined
society we're invited
to think that white
is not a color.
We're invited to fantasize,
and we act accordingly."
It is significant
to me that Banks
chose to travel from
north to south, rather
than along the East West
axis of history and culture.
By making the north,
south and south,
north directions, a key
part of his world view,
he not only opened himself to
the stories and the peoples
of the Caribbean
and Latin America,
he uncovered alternative
views of US history, culture,
and rich materials
for his next novel.
In 1985, Russell gave
us Continental Drift,
which traces the stories of
two migrant families migrating
in opposite directions, one
moving south from New Hampshire
to Florida, and one moving
north from Haiti to Florida.
And on a stormy night, the
leaders of these two families
end up at sea in a boat.
Continental Drift won
the John Dos Passos
prize, was a finalist
for the Pulitzer Prize,
and according to James Atlas was
quote, "a great American novel,
a lesson in history.
It's the most
convincing portrait
I know of contemporary America."
In 1989 he gave us
Affliction, a title
he got from reading Simone Weil.
At one point near the end of
this novel about male brutality
and family violence and
squalor, the narrator
asked a question
that signals why
we take Russell's thoughts
about immortality, sacrifice,
and humanity seriously.
The narrator says quote, "All
those dumb solitary angry men,
Wade and Pop and his
father and grandfather
had once been boys
with intelligent eyes
and brightly innocent mouths,
unafraid and loving creatures
eager to please and be pleased."
Then he asked, "what
had turned them
so quickly into the embittered
brutes they had become?
Were they all beaten
by their fathers?
Was it really that simple?"
End of quote.
That book,
Affliction, was turned
into an Academy
Award winning film
directed by Paul Schroeder.
I like the fact that his next
novel, The Sweet Hereafter,
was chosen in 1998
by the Washington
Center for the book at
the Seattle Public Library
to be the first
selection for quote,
"if all Seattle read
the same book program,"
that is continued in
the Seattle community
and at many other public
libraries around the country.
The Sweet Hereafter was also
made into an Academy Award
winning film.
In 1995 he gave us
Rule of the Bone.
And then in 1998, the
monumental Cloudsplitter,
an historical novel of
abolitionist John Brown.
It was also a runner up
for the Pulitzer Prize.
The Guardian's, Tom Cox,
selected Cloudsplitter
as quote, "one of his
overlooked classics
of American literature.
And it was widely understood
that Russell Banks has
a voice that makes speech
stand in front of you,
and not behind."
This was followed by The Darling
in 2004, The Reserve in 2008.
I like the fact that Russell
was chosen as the New York State
author for 2004 to 2006, and
that he won the Commonwealth
Writer prize, putting him
alongside other winners
like Graham Greene, Annie
Proulx, and Tom Wolfe.
Add to this list of
awards the Andrew Carnegie
Medal for Excellence in
Fiction for his latest
novel, The Lost Memory of Skin.
Students here tonight
will want to know
that he spent part of
his career teaching
at universities,
working with students--
the University of New Hampshire,
University of Maryland,
and Princeton University--
in part because he not only
wanted to work with students,
but he wanted to be in
places where he could write
his novels around
people who were critics,
people who were deep
in historical analysis,
because this in a sense,
enriched his own work.
You will want to
know that he was
past president of
the International
Parliament of Writers.
As Dean Hempton said
this past semester,
we have had a workshop called
Bearing Witness in the writings
of Russell Banks.
Some of our participants
were so moved
that they shared with
me a few responses,
and I want to give
you back their words.
Suzanne Hammer said, quote,
"I read the Sweet Hereafter
and Cloudsplitter at a time when
Russell Banks compassionate,
nuanced, and fiercely
unsparing depiction
of relationships
between fathers and sons
aided me in efforts to grapple
with tensions in my own family.
I am grateful."
And Nancy Rockwell says,
"Russell Banks' words transect
the souls of the lost,
revealing their nobility
and their self-centeredness,
their deep caring
and their carelessness, their
loneliness and their abiding
connections, in their long
journeys to perdition.
His narrator's
voice is God-like,
in unceasing attention, a God
whose eye and ear are supremely
understanding but detached.
What is divine is this
continual, unblinking witness
to the hunger and thirst of
the lost for righteousness."
One of the highlights
of our seminar
was a stirring
illuminating lecture
by my colleague in English
here at Harvard, John Stauffer,
a close reader of
Russell Banks for years.
And let me just give you his
words, as I come to a close.
John Stauffer writes,
"Banks' fiction doesn't
deny the validity of the major
concepts of sacrifice, heroism,
or wisdom, rather it
highlights the uncertainty
of their cultural value.
It is as though the structures
of his American settings,
from the slave republic
of Cloudsplitter,
to the free market capitalism
of Continental Drift
have corrupted these concepts,
and the characters who
make these worlds, and yet there
is much wisdom in his work,"
says Stauffer.
"Few, if any writers of
any genre have written more
penetratingly about what
Banks has aptly termed, quote,
'that old American weave of
violence, politics, religion,
and race.'
This troubled humanity,"
says Stauffer,
"with which Banks
endowed his protagonists,
gives new meaning to the
concept of a rounded character.
And that brings me to my
last and most compelling
reflection about
Banks work," he says,
"the unmistakable and
extraordinary beauty,
the rhythmic cadence
of his sentences,
the structural
precision of his plots,
and the clarity of
images and thoughts
that the words reveal."
You'll be pleased to know
that this past weekend I spoke
with Toni Morrison,
sharing with her
that Russell Banks was giving
this year's Ingersoll lecture.
Tony exclaimed, "Russell
Banks is an elegant writer.
I'm equally
impressed," she said,
"that he is a profound thinker.
His novels combine
feeling and knowledge.
And that combination
with his elegance,
makes his work truly
superb," she says.
So please welcome
this profound thinker,
who has come here
tonight to speak
with us about the
deep crisis we are
in, in "Feeding Moloch,
the Sacrifice of Children
on the Altar of
Capitalism, Russell Banks.
[APPLAUSE]
Good evening.
Thank you, Dean Hempton,
wherever you are.
I'm grateful for your
invitation and hospitality.
And thank you,
David Carrasco, I'm
very grateful for your
lovely introduction.
As Dean Hempton said,
the stated purpose
of these annual
Ingersoll lectures,
initiated in 1896 by
Harvard's President Eliot,
is to address the
immortality of man.
I'm truly honored to have been
invited to deliver the 2014
Ingersoll lecture,
and flattered,
especially given the distinction
and achievement of so many
of the previous lecturers,
theologians, philosophers,
and scientists,
deep thinkers all.
Intellectual giants,
some of them.
Like William James, Alfred
North Whitehead, Paul Tillich.
But frankly, I'm a
little surprised too,
for I'm decidedly,
perhaps deliberately,
not a distinguished theologian,
philosopher, or scientist.
Nor am I an especially
deep thinker.
I'm merely, but
pointedly, a storyteller.
And we storytellers tend to keep
our attention focused mostly
on the here and now.
The present tense, material
world we are born into,
and live and die in.
From time to time
we set our stories
in the distant past, yes,
but we do so mainly in order
to cast light on the present.
And on occasion, usually
when aroused to fear
and loathing of the
world that surrounds us,
we tell stories
set in the future,
disguised as so-called
science fiction,
possibly because, as the late
novelist Stanley Elkin said,
there are only two kinds
of science fiction plots,
we go there, and they come
here, so it seems easy.
Or in the form of
dark, dystopian novels,
but again, it's for the ways
they're able to cast light
on the present.
It's mainly contrasts
and compare then.
The past or the future projected
onto the present, which
is not as much a vision of
the past or of the future,
as a view of the here and now.
True stories are not
fantasies or means of escape.
They are always about how
we experience, endure, love,
and whenever possible, enjoy the
present, this life, this world,
the world in which we
were condemned to die.
In general then, and
as a consequence,
the teller of true
stories tiptoes
around addressing the
immortality of man.
Possibly, it's to
avoid having to make
a plausible image of it, as if
it were a given, at least as it
was for president Eliot
that the immortality of man
already exists on a
recognizable plane of reality,
and thus can be addressed in
something like the Ingersoll
lecture.
The image of immortality,
if the afterlife
can be said to possess imagery,
makes storytellers anxious,
possibly because of the simple
difficulty of picturing it,
except in terms of our
immediate, material, present
tense world.
My mother, who was a devout born
again Christian fundamentalist,
sincerely believed that after
she went to her reward, which
was how she liked to put
it, she would get a better
apartment and nicer neighbors.
Her only lament was
that, as an atheist,
I would not be allowed to
live in the neighborhood.
She seemed to know I'd be
rejected by heaven's co-op
board.
Which reminds me of
that well-known quip
by Woody Allen, another
anxious story teller,
"I don't want to achieve
immortality through my work,
I want to achieve immortality
through not dying.
I don't want to live on in
the hearts of my countrymen,
I want to live in my apartment."
I don't mean to
trivialize or dismiss
my mother's or Woody's
view of the afterlife.
Both of them seem similarly
too terrified of death
to imagine the afterlife,
except in terms of this life.
Theirs is an all
too human response
to the inescapable vision of
inevitable personal extinction,
the end of what Miguel
de Unamuno called
"this poor I, which I am.
The I which I feel myself
to be here and now."
A more nuanced view,
perhaps is that
of the ancient Greek
philosopher, Epicurus,
who attempted to dilute
our fear of death
with the famous
epicurean argument that
quote, "Death, that
most terrifying of ills
is nothing to us,
since so long as we
exist death is not with us.
But when death does come,
then we no longer exist,
therefore, it does not concern
the living or the dead,
since for the former is not,
and the latter are no more."
Unlike my mother's and
Woody Allen's vision
of the afterlife,
Epicurus' is an argument
against immortality, or at least
against our longing for it.
But at bottom, his
conclusion is not
all that different than
theirs, for he portrays
the afterlife, or
rather the after death,
as essentially an extension of
this life, just one in which we
merely quote, "are no more."
Like my mother and Woody Allen,
although without their view
of the afterlife, as
life to the sequel,
Epicurus refuses to imagine
human life beyond one's
personal extinction.
As I mentioned, I am a
storyteller and an atheist,
but that does not mean I have
no vision of immortality.
I may not be able to describe
it with imagery as concretely
quotidien and specific as my
mother's, or as abstract and as
syllogistically neat
as Epicurus's, but
my personal vision
of immortality
does present me with some
of the same obligations
as theirs to attend
to the quality
and meaning of the life I try
to lead in the here and now.
And of course, that vision
has had a profound effect
on my work as a storyteller.
I believe that the
future of our species,
our after life, in a broad,
Darwinian, and anthropological
sense, perhaps even in a
transcendental spiritual
and moral sense, lies with
our descendants, our children
and their children, and on
into the indefinite future
with emphasis on
the word indefinite.
I believe it was
ever thus, at least
since our prehistoric
ancestors first
raised their knuckles
from the ground
and walked upright
across the African veldt.
For this reason, from our
mistily distant beginnings
forward, we as a species
have created and preserved
the quality of our after life,
indeed, its very existence,
by protecting our children from
the amoral forces in our shared
world that would harm or
annihilate them, or use them
for its own purposes.
We sheltered the young
and protected them
from the cold and the
heat and wild animals,
and the belligerence
of neighboring tribes.
We saw that they were
ignorant, and that their brains
and nervous systems were
as unformed and immature
as their childish bodies.
So we taught them which
plants and animals to eat
and which not to eat.
We taught them the difference
between the dog and the wolf,
the house cat and the lion,
the dove and the serpent.
Perhaps most importantly,
we taught them
who among us they should
trust and who not to trust.
In this manner we
assured ourselves
of having an afterlife,
yes; but one characterized
by the social and moral values
and the utilitarian application
of those values that we have
used from time immemorial
to protect ourselves,
just as we have
used them to protect our
children from the amoral forces
that would harm or annihilate
us or use us for purposes
other than our own.
We were not merely raising
and socializing our children
in a narrow Darwinian sense
like all other species
so that they could
grow up and breed
more and stronger
versions of themselves,
we were creating an
afterlife for ourselves,
for us, the old ones.
I believe this is
how we are allowed
to live on beyond our
death into the future.
Consider therefore,
a doomsday scenario,
posited by the contemporary
American philosopher
Samuel Scheffler.
He writes, quote, "Suppose
you knew that, although you,
yourself would live
a normal life span,
the earth would be
completely destroyed
30 days after your
death in a collision
with a giant asteroid."
This scenario, in
slightly different form,
is central to Lars Von
Trier's remarkable 2011 film,
Melancholia, and is close to
the premise of PD James novel,
The Children of Men, and
Alfonso Cuaron's 2006 film
adaptation of the novel,
in which human beings have
become infertile with no
recorded birth in 25 years.
Scheffler asks, "What
would life be like, i.e.
present day, human life,
collectively and individually
if we knew that 30 days
after our death no one,
absolutely no one
would be alive?
Or why not 30 years
after our death?
In other words, if one
knew that on a given day
shortly after one died human
beings would no longer exist
on this planet, how would one
change one's remaining days?
What would one do or
feel differently?"
Scheffler argues that absent
his doomsday scenario,
we simply take it for granted
that human life will indeed
continue long after we have
died into the indefinite future.
And in that sense, we
take it for granted
that there will be an afterlife.
He further argues that
this confident, largely
unacknowledged belief, is
a necessary and sufficient
condition for most
of the traditions,
values, and activities
that truly matter to us.
And therefore, a world faced
with his 30-day doomsday
scenario, one with
no afterlife that
is a world in which the
necessary and sufficient
condition of belief in an
afterlife has been removed,
would be quote, "a
world characterized
by widespread apathy,
anomie, and despair,
by the erosion of
social institutions
and social solidarity,
by the deterioration
of the physical environment, and
a pervasive loss of conviction
about the value or point of
many activities," end quote.
We would have no successors,
no descendants, no children
to give meaning to our
most important traditions,
values, and activities.
Scheffler suggests that
in protecting our children
against the amoral,
impersonal forces that
would harm and
annihilate them, forces
that would use our children
for their own blind purposes,
we are in fact,
preserving the existence
and nature of our afterlife.
He writes, quote,
"in certain respects,
future generations'
survival matters more to us
than our own.
From this perspective,
what is salient
is not their dependence
on us, but rather
our dependence on them."
If I may be allowed to
invoke authorial intention,
while partially deconstructing
two of my novels, which
were discussed in the
seminar of my work conducted
this past month
here at Harvard, I
would like briefly to apply
these thoughts on the afterlife
to a novel called Rule of the
Bone and The Sweet Hereafter.
As I think Professor
Carrasco mentioned,
I attended one of these
seminar meetings earlier today,
and I found it both
enlightening and inspiring.
I want to thank the students
and professors who took the time
to read my work and reflect
upon it with such diligence
and insightful intelligence.
I'm proud to have my
work read and studied
at Harvard, especially since,
in 1958 I was denied admission
as a student.
And until today, I
had thought, judging
from letters from readers
that my ideal readers were
prison inmates and high
school and college dropouts,
people who took my
books personally.
I no longer think that.
But I have, over the
years, given much thought
to the phenomenon of what I call
the lost children, its causes
and consequences.
Perhaps it's because,
on a certain level,
I early on viewed myself
and my three siblings
as lost or abandoned children.
Although we were not literally
abandoned except by my father.
We were emotionally abandoned
by both parents, however,
and were denied the
sort of protection
against the amoral
and personal forces
in our world that would
harm if not annihilate us.
Protection that I have
been describing here
is anciently characteristic
of our species.
Not exactly raised by
wolves, my siblings and I
were nonetheless able
somehow to raise ourselves
thanks to the
protective intervention
of certain teachers
and neighborly adults,
distant members of
the tribe let's say,
residing in nearby
caves and huts
that we visited
from time to time.
And possibly, for reasons
that I will point out later,
thanks too to the
fact that we were
children born in the 1940s,
not the 1980s and beyond.
Rule of the Bone and
The Sweet Hereafter,
although in many ways
conventionally realistic
novels, can be read as fables,
telling the story of the lost
children in our time.
The former told from the point
of view of the lost child.
The latter, from the point
of view of the adults who
are left behind.
They are not meant
as cautionary tales,
however, so much as
layered portrayals
of a largely unacknowledged,
potentially tragic,
exponentially worsening
aspect of our time,
and what we think of as
Western civilization.
Although the triggering plot
mechanism for Rule of the Bone
is the sexual abuse of a
teenage boy by his stepfather
in a double wide trailer
in upstate New York,
and the initiator of the
action in The Sweet Hereafter
it's a school bus
accident in which many
of the children in a small
Adirondack town are killed,
both stories are
meant to lead us
to a reflective, perhaps
self-reflective awareness,
of the depersonalizing
use of children,
both sexually in the first case,
and monetarily in the second.
Suggesting perhaps, that
this linked use, or misuse,
or abuse of children,
is not merely
characteristic of a small
town in upstate New York--
where both novels
are mostly set--
but is in fact, a pervasive
widespread characteristic
of our society, our culture,
our world that it is true of us
now as a people.
In both novels, the
children in question
are depersonalized, objectified,
sexualized, and/or monetised
by the adults, and applied to
a purpose other than the adults
after life.
In both novels, the adults,
with the possible exception
of the Rastafarian ganja
grower in Rule of the Bone,
and the female driver of
the school bus in The Sweet
Hereafter, are unaware of
the meaning and consequences
of their actions.
They are not evil.
By and large, the
adult characters
are just lone, inept, swimmers
in a cultural sea that
surrounds them,
and both buoys them
up and threatens to drown them.
There is no safe
harbor, no landfall.
How can they be expected to save
the children when they cannot
save themselves?
That's an image that
describes a plight.
Let me invoke an image
that tells a tale.
The salesman and
his sample case,
struggling to get
through the door
into the family's living room.
The mother or father are
both slamming the door
on the salesman's foot.
The salesman climbs to
the transom above the door
and tries to gain entry
there, and the parents
slam the transom on his fingers.
Now, the salesman is at the
window waving to the kids.
The adults lock the
windows, draw the shades.
It's a familiar image from
the cartoons and comics
in the first half
of the 20th century.
Its purpose, of course,
is to illustrate
that the family, especially the
more easily deceived members
of the family, which
is to say the children,
must be protected
from the blandishments
of the clever, smiling salesman.
He is the living embodiment
of the amoral force
of the consumer economy.
His DNA compels him to find
a way to get inside the home
and extract from
the people hiding
there the fruits of
their collective labors--
nothing more, nothing less.
It's the same force and strategy
behind the Sears and Roebuck
catalog.
He possesses no greater
complexity or moral ambivalence
regarding his
mission than a wolf
on the prowl for an easy meal,
or dangerous weather, a flash
flood or a drought.
Only the vigilance,
diligence, and hard
earned wisdom of the adults
passed down from the elders
can keep the salesman at
bay, drive off the wolf,
move the family to higher
ground to avoid the flood,
or gather the family
together and join
the tribe and its
pilgrimage over the dunes
to a dimly remembered oasis.
Across the millennia,
our species
has had to adapt
and learn to protect
its young in different ways,
from different threats.
Against neighboring tribes
who would capture and enslave
and sexually exploit the
young, we raised walls
and built fortified cities.
To save the children
from priests
who would sacrifice
them to their gods,
we made taboos and sanctified
biblical prohibitions, as
in Leviticus 20, verses 2
to 5, say to the Israelites,
any Israelite or any
foreigner residing
in Israel who sacrifices any
of his children to Moloch
is to be put to death.
The members of the
community are to stone him.
I myself, will set
my face against him,
and will cut him
off from his people,
for by sacrificing his
children to Moloch,
he has defiled my sanctuary
and profaned my holy name.
Or second Kings 23,
verse 10, no man
might make his son
or his daughter
to pass through
the fire to Moloch.
Or simply consider the
story of Abraham and Isaac.
In the pre-industrial era
until the children of agrarian
and herding peoples
were old enough
to be initiated into adult
life by means of control,
structured tests,
trials, and rituals,
they were kept close to hearth
and home, tending the garden,
performing household chores,
and listening to the adults
from the children's
corner of the hut.
More recently, during and
following the Industrial
Revolution, against
the tireless resistance
of those who owned and
controlled the industries,
we sought child labor laws,
universal public education,
a penal system
that distinguishes
between punishment
and rehabilitation,
between children and adults.
And now, in our
post-industrial age,
in the age of so-called
free market capitalism,
with the near total dominance
of the gross national product
by the consumer economy,
to protect the children all
we seem capable of
doing is slam the door
on the foot of the salesman.
But it's too late.
There's no longer
anyone at the door.
The salesman has
long since taken up
permanent digitalized
residence in the kids' bedroom,
on their TV and computer
screens, their tablets
and phones.
He's made himself
comfortable day and night
in the living room TV too.
He is checking out the
refrigerator and bathroom
to see if the family
has room for more
manufactured, genetically
manipulated food
stuff and unneeded
hair care products.
He's in the garage
calculating the trade-in value
with the family van,
all the while linking
every member of the family,
the entire household,
to the global
money-lending system,
so that you don't even have
to sign on a dotted line.
All you need to do is click.
Many of you may
remember, as I do,
when television entered
our domestic space
in the early 1950s.
And we were under the now,
obviously mistaken impression,
that the advertisements
existed in order
to make the
programming possible.
Just as some of us
may at first have
believed that the
ads on the internet
were what made it possible for
us to open the myriad portals
to the digital universe.
We know better today, of course.
We know that from the beginning,
the televised programs
existed solely to provide
a domestic delivery system
for the ads, not vise versa.
Ads cleverly designed
to induce viewers,
consumers, to purchase
goods and services
they might otherwise survive
quite nicely without,
thank you.
And more recently, we
have been made aware
that video games, digitalized
social networks like Facebook
and Twitter, servers
like Firefox and Safari,
digital behemoths
like Google and Yahoo,
online retailers like
Amazon, eBay, and Alibaba,
depend for their
financial success,
for their very survival, on
their ability to seduce viewers
and users into engaging--
that is interfacing--
with advertisers.
Even the coolly
seductive hardware,
phones, game consoles, tablets,
and computers themselves,
and the fabulous flat
screen HD televisions,
serves almost
exclusively the purposes
of the ravenous
consumer economy.
We may be less aware,
however, of who among
us are the primary targets of
this global, interconnected
delivery system.
I'm speaking, as you may
have guessed, of children.
The largest, single segment of
the American consumer economy.
A segment worth over $1 trillion
to the gross national product.
This will not be
news to many here,
but let me hit you with
some numbers anyhow.
From the Journal of the
American Medical Association,
children between
the ages of 2 and 17
watch an average of 15,000
to 18,000 hours of television
per year, compared
with the 12,000 hours
per year they're in school.
This is from "Children as
Consumers" in Global Issues.
The average American child
watches an estimated 25,000
to 40,000 television
commercials per year.
And in 2010, $15
to $17 billion was
spent by companies advertising
strictly to children.
Over $4 billion in 2009 was
spent by the fast food industry
alone.
In 2010, American teenagers
spent around $160 billion
per year on consumer goods.
I love that word, "goods."
Children up to the age of
11 spent around $18 billion
a year.
Tweens, as 8- to
12-year-olds are called,
heavily influence, quote,
unquote, "more than $30 billion
in other spending by parents."
80% of all global brands now
deploy a "tween" strategy.
Here, from an article
in Adweek, entitled
"The Next Great
American Consumer,
Infants to 3-year-olds."
The author, Brian Braiker
happily trumpets that, quote,
"Disney and countless
other brands
are targeting a demographic that
didn't exist in marketers eyes
until recently, infants
to three-year-olds."
He notes approvingly
that the campaign
for a commercial-free childhood
reports that by six months
babies are forming mental images
of corporate logos and mascots,
and that babies request brands
as soon as they can speak.
Other studies show that by
the time on American child
is three years old, he
or she can recognize
an average of 100 brand logos.
80% of kids three and younger
are now watching videos online.
In 2011, one in four mothers
allowed their children
to interact with a
mobile phone by age two.
Infants now have their own TV
network, with BabyFirstTV.com.
This may seem extreme, even a
little shocking to those of us
over a certain
age, but remember,
in a very few years these
same children, these infants
and tweens, will be parents
themselves, for whom
watching 40,000 televised
commercials per year
has been totally normalized.
They will quickly become us,
just as the tweens replace
themselves every year
with a fresh crop,
so do parents,
generation by generation.
Since the 1950s when we gave up,
drank the televised Kool-Aid,
and let the now pixillated
salesman pass through the door
and make himself at
home in our home,
three generations of parents
have raised their children
in that salesman's relentless,
entertaining, utterly
cynical, sexualizing presence.
Once it was proved that adults
will buy sexy stuff faster
than sexless stuff, a
phenomenon discovered
by auto manufacturers
in the 1950s,
advertisers learned to sexualize
otherwise sexless children
in order to sell
them sexy things too.
Today's young parents cannot
remember when it was any
different.
It was not always thus, even
though the Babylonian code
of Hammurabi in 1750 BC
made it a capital offense
to sell anything to a child.
And prior to around
1915, there were
no separate infants and
children's clothing departments
in department stores.
The conversion of American
children into consumers gains
lift off earlier
than you might think.
In 1929, President
Herbert Hoover
convened a White House
Conference on child health
and protection, which
resulted in a 1931 report
called "The Home and the Child,"
affirming that because children
are independent beings with
their own needs and interests,
parents should provide them
with their own rooms, furniture,
toys, clothing, et cetera.
To accommodate all
these things, it
was pointed out houses
would have to grow in size.
So we needed a housing
boom, in other words.
Quote, "generally a sleeping
room for each person
is desirable," the
report suggested.
Parents were advised to take
their children shopping, quote,
"for their own things,
and let them pick them
out for themselves.
Through such experiences,
personality develops,"
the report continued.
"These experiences
have the advantage
of also creating in the
child a sense of personal,
as well as family
pride in ownership,
and eventually teaching
him that his personality
can be expressed through
things," end quote.
So the conversion of American
children into consumers
appears to have received
its official [INAUDIBLE]
at the White House.
The Great Depression
and World War II
may have postponed
its implementation
as domestic economic policy
for a decade and a half,
but by the late 1940s
and the commencement
of an unprecedented
era of prosperity,
American manufacturers,
including the housing
and automobile industries and
their advertising agencies,
had discovered and begun to
target the ideal consumer--
one who is naive,
impressionable, insecure,
and status hungry, and best
of all, self replacing.
So that every year, a whole
new tier of seven-year-olds
would rise to replace last
year's seven-year-olds
and demand new sneakers to
replace last year's models,
which no longer fit her anyhow.
It's as if having
exhausted the supply
of naive, impressionable,
insecure, and status-hungry,
self-replacing adults in the
so-called developing world, who
are willing to exchange their
labor and natural resources
for beads, bobbles, and
whiskey, we came home and began
to colonize ourselves.
One might call the
process auto colonization,
or in James Joyce's
memorable phrase,
it's a case of the old
sow eating her own farrow.
When a society transforms its
children into consumers making
them want, want, want, in order
to sell them and their parents,
not what the children need
but what they have been made
to want, it commodifies
and monetizes its children,
it objectifies them,
it dehumanizes them.
The dehumanization
of human beings
through commodification--
using, misusing, and
abusing human beings
for purposes other than
their own development
as human beings--
converts them into livestock,
inventory, it is madness.
Normalized, it fits the
definition of chattel slavery--
centuries of slavery
in the Americas
created and normalized, for both
slave holders and slaves alike,
a world similarly gone mad.
A world in which a newborn
black child was merely
a commodity, a thing of
variable, speculative value,
depending on the economic
worth of the objects age, sex,
health, and skill set, to be
bought and sold over and over
again on the open market.
No different than pork
bellies, wheat, corn, or soy.
It puts me in mind of Toni
Morrison's great novel Beloved.
In such a world the
child born in slavery,
Beloved is not a human being.
She is a thing.
So that Morrison can pause it
that yes, in a world gone mad,
it may be saner to
sacrifice that child
so she can live on,
if only as a ghost.
The novel raises a
fundamental human question
that we would all
prefer go unanswered.
Would you sacrifice your child
to save her from a life worse
than death?
A life that you, yourself
have experienced firsthand,
and like Beloved's mother,
Sethe miraculously escaped.
Or would you choose to believe
in miracles, like my mother,
perhaps?
Or Woody Allen's dream of living
on in his Manhattan apartment?
When the true value
of a people's children
is reduced to their access
to the capital and credit
controlled by their parents
and the communities who
value their children
instead, as they're
our only chance
for an afterlife,
the people are deprived
of their, our, after life.
I return to the doomsday
scenario, Samuel Scheffler,
quote, "If by the
afterlife," he writes,
"we mean the continuation
of human life on Earth
after our own
deaths, then it seems
difficult to avoid
the conclusion
that in some
significant respects,
the existence of the
afterlife matters more to us
than our own continued
existence," end quote.
Unlike Morrison's
enslaved mother Sethe,
who knowingly
sacrificed her child
to save her from enslavement,
we have unknowingly
sacrificed our children
in order to feed
Moloch, the god of capitalism.
The god that Allen Ginsberg,
in his apocalyptic poem,
"Howl," wails and
rails against Moloch,
whose mind is pure machinery.
Moloch, whose blood
is running money.
Though we didn't see it when
it first began, or even now,
when it has gone
on for generations,
we have been left with a fading
after image, a subconscious
awareness of having
sacrificed our children,
which in turn has
led us to guilt,
denial, then an overprotective
mania colored and compounded
by sexual hysteria.
Having sold off our only chance
at immortality, we as a people,
a species-wide family, are left
with a subconscious awareness
of having abandoned our
children, generating guilt,
denial, and then transference--
states of mind
easily manipulated
and exploited by the priests
who run the consumer economy.
Leading us to
overprotect our children
against random violence, sexual
predation, accident, and fate.
As if to preserve
them, and eventually
their children and grandchildren
as well, not for our
after life, but for the
permanent ongoing use
of Moloch, the
god of capitalism.
Gustave Flaubert, in his
visionary novel, Salammbo,
describes our pagan
god most vividly.
The brazen arms were
working more quickly,
they paused no longer.
Every time that a child
was placed in them,
the priests of Moloch
spread out their hands
upon him to burden him with
the crimes of the people,
vociferating, they
are not men, but oxen.
And the multitude round about
repeated, oxen, oxen, for they
are not human children, but
our one after life, they
are commodities,
livestock, oxen, oxen.
The devout exclaimed, Lord, eat.
The victims, when scarcely
at the edge of the opening
disappeared like a drop of
water on a red hot plate,
and white smoke rose amid
the great scarlet color.
Nevertheless, the appetite
of that God was not appeased.
He ever wished for more.
Like the ancient Canaanites we
have sacrificed our children,
not in the way of Morrison's
enslaved mother Sethe,
in order to save our
children from an enslavement
that we, ourselves have
miraculously escaped,
but rather to have them join
us in our own enslavement.
To truly save our children
from the flames of Moloch,
we must first save ourselves.
And who among us, can
help us save ourselves?
Which members of the tribe
are capable of showing us,
of reminding us, what
it is to be truly human.
Which is to say, to be the
only creature on the planet
with an afterlife.
A peculiarity of our
specie is that we,
unlike all other species,
cannot know our own true nature
without each new generation
being freshly shown it.
For millennia, in order
to learn and relearn
our own true nature,
we have turned
to our storytellers and poets,
our artists and musicians.
From the caves of
Lascaux, whose painted
walls are perhaps best viewed as
narrative, to Flaubert, Joyce,
Unamuno, Ginsburg, and Morrison,
by way of Homer, Cervantes,
Shakespeare, Bach,
Mozart, Ellington, and on,
selections from my
personal canon--
each of us has his or her own.
The sole task of art has been
to reveal to the tribe what
it is to be human.
Not a thing.
Not livestock.
Not a commodity.
Not merely a consumer.
We must turn away from
the fires of Moloch
and face ourselves, in
the images of ourselves
made for us by our artists.
We must see ourselves, not
in the fantasied future
or in the memorialized past,
but in the here and now,
in the immediate
present, no matter
how frightening we seem to one
another in those images, how
foolish and weak we seem, how
confused and fearful, angry
and cruel.
For behind those images,
generating and shaping them,
looms the artist's
unsentimental, nonjudgmental
love of humanity and
human nature itself,
and the pure, passionate love
of our earthly existence.
Love that we must make
our own and pass forward
to our children
and grandchildren,
if we are to protect them
from the priests of Moloch.
If we are indeed, to
have an afterlife,
perhaps we need to
rethink the nature of love
and our capacity for it.
In our artist's dedication
to love of human kind,
it's a requirement
that we forego
sentimentality and judgment.
But that is a subject for
another lecture than this.
And my time is now finished.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
