A brief follow-up to my 7/31 posting “Of money, class, and prejudice”, where I told a story about an acquaintance, Johnny, from early in my life, who was blessed with privilege, family money, and social connections, and turned out to be, unsuspectedly, a reflexive anti-Semite, revealing himself while he was dissing me and my family (“they might as well be Jews”). My friend Bill (from summer camp in childhood, then from Princeton, and then from the summer of 1961, when I stayed in his family’s house) served as a kind of counterbalance in this tale, as someone blessed with privilege, family money, and social connections who has been a good friend to me and also has devoted a big slice of his life working doggedly against poverty, urban decline, and racial injustice, just because he thinks these things need fixing and he can do something to help).
At this point there’s a posting to be written on the nature of friendship, involving as it does a recognition, on both sides, of significant disparities between the two of you, which each of you then respect by working around them with as little comment as possible (adjustments often made without conscious reflection), in exchange for enjoying the good qualities the other person brings to the relationship.
In e-mail Bill and I have been looking at these disparities, at how we dealt with them long ago and how we come at them now. Back then, he was somewhat uncomfortable with his position of privilege, family money, and social connection, but is now untroubled by these things, understanding that, as I said to him:
in large part, these are things that just come to you, and the question is what you’ll do with them
and that he had in fact put these advantages to good use throughout his life. Indeed, one of our first exchanges had to be cut short because he was off to demonstrate in the local Good Trouble National Day of Action (honoring John Lewis) — at the age of 85 (Bill is 6 months older than I am, and obviously vigorous in a way I am not).
And then I riffed some on advantages:
privilege, family money, and social connections, along with other advantages on this (seriously incomplete) list (some of them guy-specific):
— height, good looks, big dick, fast-twitch muscle fibers, perfect pitch, IQ-test smarts, high natural testosterone, ability to enter trance states, cogitive empathy (ability to take other people’s points of view), manual dexterity, memory for texts, memory for tunes, physical endurance, inventiveness, associative thinking, way-finding ability, amiability, cooperativeness, ability to manipulate images mentally, leadership, persuasiveness, physical strength, …
The list includes things I conspicuously lack and things I conspicuously have and some things in between. Most people probably don’t know about some of my advantages. For example, high natural testosterone played out in a very early onset of puberty and a lifelong high sex drive (still chugging along, a source of daily pleasure), but. more important, in enhanced protection against depression, and a companion ability to pick myself up and get along with life (it’s a cushion, not a magic elixir, but it’s gotten me through sone dramatically nasty times). And an ability to enter trance states allows me to more or less literally go away in the face of great pain (and to go to sleep in seconds when I want to).
I also note that people with conspicuous natural advantages often spend lifetimes of practice to enhance and maintain their abilities: Bill Bradley, famously; Roger Federer earnestly cross-training all of his life; Pablo Casals and Keith Richards both spending hours a day in practice. The gift is one thing, what you do with it another. And if you don’t cultivate it, it could wither away. And it could be damaged, even irrevocably, by events (people can be wounded beyond repair).
I stress again that the list above is seriously incomplete. My father had an extraordinary ability to make wonderful things out of wood (he was in general extraordinarily handy in many ways, capable of reorganizing and reworking the interior rooms of a house completely). Mostly useful things, like furniture. But also delightful things, like wooden toys and games (made for me). I don’t know quite what to call this ability.
But I think there are lots more, and that they are widely distributed. It wouldn’t be crazy to suppose that virtually everybody has some advantages, some gifts (and some lacks, some failures as well).
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