August 17, 2008
Dear Colleague:
"We are all created equal." Ever since the eighteenth century, Westerners of conscience have been hassled by this statement. At one level, it is manifestly false. Watching the Olympic games has rubbed home how unequal I am in regard to the Olympians—at all levels, even at the level of calories consumed. Do you know that the supreme Olympian of Beijing games, Michael Phelps, has a daily intake of 12,000 calories? My respectable 2,000 suddenly feels paltry by comparison; even so I carry them about as a heavy burden. Intellectually, my own utter inadequacy became compelling when I was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Chicago. I consoled myself that I wasn't prepared—that I simply didn't have enough calculus—to take up the fellowship, knowing all the while that it was a false claim, for even in probability theory, which was more parlor game than math, I was humiliatingly slow figuring out the proportion of black, red, and white balls in a jar. And then there is musical talent. Last night I watched a DVD of Bach's Christmas Oratorio, featuring Vienna's Tolzer Boys' Choir and its soloists. Some of the boy trebles couldn't be more than ten years old. Yet there they were standing in front of the choir, singing confidently, weaving their voices with the adult voices of tenor and bass. Close-ups of these young singers showed them in all their tender loveliness, made even more lovely and adorable by an occasional impish grin. Looking at the boys reminds me of another inequality—the inequality of physical appearance. With good looks, one gives pleasure by simply walking into a room. Exceptional ugliness, by contrast, injects an uncontrollable chill. Compared with these inequalities, which are beyond one's control, economic inequality seems a minor matter. Nevertheless, it is haunting, especially when it occurs in supposedly egalitarian Madison. Having just had a good meal at Husnus, I walked down Broom Street to find a dumpster diver retrieving a half-bottle of diet Coke.
Mary McCarthy shares my horror of inequality. Her effort to be equal is carried to quixotic extremes. "I find that I feel guilty and awkward in the presence of a psychotic person, as though I ought to conceal my sanity in the interest of equality with him. The same with a stupid person; I am mortified in conversation with him, afraid of saying something that will disclose his stupidity to him" (Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy).
Does a beautiful face count more than a beautiful voice? At the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, a cute girl of nine sang beautifully. Later, the organizers confessed that the cute girl didn't sing; another girl, who didn't look pretty enough for international viewing, sang in her place. Westerners objected on the grounds that the girl who provided the voice was humiliated. The girl herself, however, didn't think so."What's the big deal? My friend has the face, I have the voice. We rightly collaborated. Why do you think that the one is not the equal of the other?" The West's objection doesn't surprise me, however. After all, it has always found a fat diva singing like an angel, as in grand opera, quite acceptable.
Americans cleverly dodge the question of inequality by inventing the "ordinary Joe." The very fact that "ordinary Joe" doesn't have any special qualities makes him, paradoxically, special—indeed, archetypal, the very embodiment of Americanness.
Best wishes,
Yi-Fu
Terms of Use, How to Cite.