Ampersand Gazette #61
Welcome to the Ampersand Gazette, a metaphysical take on some of the news of the day. If you know others like us, who want to create a world that includes and works for everyone, please feel free to share this newsletter. The sign-up is here. And now, on with the latest …
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Pediatrician Hilary Cass is the kind of hero the world needs today. She has entered one of the most toxic debates in our culture: how the medical community should respond to the growing numbers of young people who seek gender transition through medical treatments.
In 1877 a British philosopher and mathematician named William Kingdon Clifford published an essay called “The Ethics of Belief.” … To have a belief is to bear responsibility, and one thus has a moral responsibility to dig arduously into the evidence, avoid ideological thinking and take into account self-serving biases. A belief, he continued, is a public possession. If too many people believe things without evidence, “the danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them; for then it must sink back into savagery.”
People segregate into intellectually cohesive teams, which are always dumber than intellectually diverse teams. Issues are settled by intimidation, not evidence. Our natural human tendency is to be too confident in our knowledge, too quick to ignore contrary evidence. But these days it has become acceptable to luxuriate in those epistemic shortcomings, not to struggle against them.
Recently it’s been encouraging to see cases in which the evidence has won out. I’m hoping that Hilary Cass is modeling a kind of behavior that will be replicated across academia, in the other professions and across the body politic more generally and thus save us from spiraling into an epistemological doom loop.
from an Opinion Essay in The New York Times by David Brooks
“The Courage to Follow the Evidence on Transgender Care”
April 19, 2024
No matter where your opinion lands on transgender care, whatever you believe is your responsibility. The irony of that is that so very many of us have inherited our beliefs, and never even paused to examine them.
What is an unexamined belief? That’s called a habit.
When I was younger, I had a mane of curly red hair. I preferred to let it dry naturally. So far, so good. My hair was thick enough that it took a good two hours till it was really dry. Enter my mother’s belief that if I went out with wet hair, I’d catch a cold.
Living in New York City as a professional, I had a job. That particular employer had a hard and fast rule that the only acceptable time was on time. It’s a habit I have kept to this day. However, after I dutifully caught a cold three weeks running (demonstrating my mother’s belief,) I began to ask myself if hers was perhaps a silly policy.
So one morning I decided to get to work on time, and my hair was still wet, and I would not get a cold. And that’s exactly what happened. On time, wet hair, no cold. What did I do?
I changed my mind. Interesting, isn’t it, that the idiom is not ‘I changed my brain.’
Now that was an example with relatively low stakes, it was just me and my mother duking it out metaphorically and mentally. It also made my life a whole lot easier when I could go out without getting sick, despite wet hair.
But what about when our beliefs—which we create—affect the wellbeing of other people? Is it not then our literal duty to seek out evidence? Not to believe ‘wrong’ things—especially opinionated misinformation? To insist upon testing things and inquiring into them? Otherwise, as Mr. Brooks straight-up says, “it [society] must sink back into savagery.”
At the risk of offense, at the core of the overturn of Roe v. Wade, the policing of pubescent souls and their genders, the rampant systemic racism in our economic and medical policies, aren’t all of these one belief projected over, onto, under, and through those who are affected? I think it is.
That belief may be expressed: you, whomever you may be, are not capable of being responsible for or taking care of or making decisions for … your own body.
Really? Really?
Because last time I checked each spirit/soul of us has been entrusted to our bodies, and our bodies have been entrusted to each spirit/soul.
So because you have a belief that that isn’t true, you get some sort of say over me? Is that what you mean?
In one of those wonderful synchronicities that happen in a life, I recently read the words of a woman who observed that ‘if women treated men the way men treat women, they’d be up in arms.’ The sentiment was in a social science book. Then later that same day, I read the same idea in two others! One, a history book; the other, a romance.
Bodily autonomy. That’s what all this posturing about the alleged safety of our children (humbug!) is about.
Bodily autonomy means to me that since my body is mine for the duration of this lifetime, what I say and do about that same body goes—as long as I don’t hurt anyone else’s body in the process.
Mr. Brooks is right. We are, as a species, quick to ignore contradictory evidence, that is, evidence which conflicts with what we want to believe. Operative word there? Want.
The next time a belief of yours comes up for examination, especially if it could affect the life or body of another, pause a moment to ask: Would you want your belief projected all over you?
If not, start to investigate. Ask questions. Especially ask those questions of the persons whose lives or bodies you want to regulate. If you’ll listen for the evidence, the owners of those lives and bodies will tell you exactly what they need, and you might just get an expanded belief in the bargain.
P.S. For those who follow the transgender care saga, I was happy to read this in today’s Times: “Biden Administration Restores Health Protections for Gay and Transgender People” The Health and Human Services Department finalized a rule prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, reversing a Trump-era policy.
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Depicting extremes of human emotion, the oldest extant Western plays invited the citizens of ancient Greece to confront vital issues of contemporary justice.
Only the men could act on them, though, because the women couldn’t vote.
Perhaps Aeschylus and Euripides and the other big winners of fifth century B.C. Tony Awards will not be front-of-mind for you at “Suffs,” the musical about women’s suffrage that opened on Thursday at the Music Box on Broadway. But subwaying home, feeling jubilant yet dissatisfied, I couldn’t help mulling what the show says about the uses of theater 2,500 years later.
Or even 100 years later. …
The Greeks are useful here, having made sure to embody injustice in emotion, and even song, not just instruction. Their theater depicted the way policy and character were inseparably bonded.
from a review by Jesse Green in The New York Times
Review: In ‘Suffs,’ the Thrill of the Vote and How She Got It
April 19, 2024
The uses of theatre 2,500 years later, 100 years later, even, dare I add, 100 minutes later, are legion. Theatre has been mirroring humanity back to itself since its very inception.
A live, collaborative artform, on a stage—despite endless rehearsals—anything can happen.
Read that again: anything can happen.
Anything.
Anyone who has ever spent time working in live theatre has their own theatre disaster stories, all of them triumphant, or most anyway.
Just as anything can happen in a theatre, anything can happen in a life.
I happen to know someone who just got the final signature from her supervisor on a fraught seven-year saga that has (finally) ended in her doctorate. We spoke right after she heard amidst the sheer relief of her tears.
One of the things I said to her was that it was time to start saying it had only taken her seven years. She laughed. Only? Sure, I said. Just think about it: during those seven years you experienced a worldwide cataclysm called COVID-19 (that set her back about 2 years) and then as soon as much of the world had a plan to handle the global disaster, her mother died, a personal catastrophe (that set her back about 1 year.) That’s why I said, Only seven years.
We don’t like to live as though anything can happen, even though at some existential level we absolutely know this to be true. Instead, we like to uphold the pretense that we are like those strictly male Athenian thespians, to wit, confronting vital issues of contemporary justice.
Even if they were, and even if we are, “Only the men could act on them, though, because the women couldn’t vote.” The notion at the time was that women were simply flawed men, creatures in whom Deity had made a dreadful mistake. Today we know this isn’t true, but we don’t always act that way.
Anything can happen, Belovèd, in the life of a man or a woman and every gender in-between, and all around those binary two. This is what levels the playing field. We’re all here. We’re all doing this life together. We’re desperately in need of letting the theatre, dance, opera, ballet, painting, sculpture, fiction, nonfiction—every artform—show us how we are living, and how we could live if we so chose, even 100 seconds from now.
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Here’s a universal affirmation. It works every time, for everyone, always and forever …
paraphrase Mike Dooley
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And in publishing news …
Here is a totally cool thing! The New York Times has a relatively new feature called “Overlooked No More.” It features the obituaries of people who were left out of The Times over history, most of them women, and look who’s there!
“Overlooked No More: Lizzie Magie, the Unknown Inventor Behind Monopoly.” Lizzie Magie is a character in Jasmine Increscent! I discovered her as I did the research for Jasmine’s vicety, and she’s totally amazing.
Lizzie originally conceived the game of Monopoly to create a fun way to learn about an economic theory espoused by Henry George having to do with taxing land, and landowners, not the buildings that sit on them. Her story is well worth the read.
Well, Mercury just went direct (thank all the gods and monsters)—so after I got that weird, legalistic reply from my original specialty reader, and have had to send another inquiry to someone else who ghosted me, so I found a local person who was delighted to help. She’s working on her suggestions this weekend, so publication day is … pending, but closer.
I wrote again to the cover artist, and she answered me immediately, so her bit is complete … and that means publication day is … pending, but closer.
So, if you want the paperbacks, look carefully. There are two volumes for each title. If you want the Kindle, there’s one file for each title.
The first two of the tetralogy, Jezebel Rising and Jasmine Increscent can be found at these live links for ebooks and paperbacks.
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Because we completed the out-loud proofreading of Gemma, and the Energy Leaks project is on simmer, we’ve had a lot more space to talk about my burgeoning ideas for the new top-secret series I’m already researching. I can comfortably reveal one major subject in the eight, or nine, book series is the AIDS crisis.
I’m still elbows deep in reading Sarah Schulman’s Let the Record Show, which is a truly brilliant treatment of the extraordinary grass-roots activism accomplished by ACT UP/New York. I am struck over and over again by the united purpose which, despite human egos and infighting and whole bunch of other shenanigans that we get up to, helped a hugely disparate group of people draw worldwide attention to a crime of gross neglect, wayward pride, and unexamined prejudice that was bigger, deeper, wider, crueler than I can even imagine.
Thousands of people were dying. Thousands, and governments, scientists, and the media stuck their fingers in their ears and sang out la-la-la-la-las like three-year-olds who didn’t want to hear that it was bedtime. The core of their behavior was the utter devaluing of just who those dying people were.
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Do you have a deep dream about writing a book? A lot of us do. But the thing about writing a book is, as Julia Cameron would say, you have to show up at the page. Take it from someone who’s written 40 books, sometimes those blank pages can be intimidating! That’s where a good writing coach makes all the difference. May I encourage you to reach out if you need book-husbanding, which includes coaching along the way? My husband, Tony Amato’s participation in my ongoing creative process makes his work invaluable to mine. If you need anything in your writing life, Tony Amato is the person. Find him here.
So this week, maybe because Mercury went Direct, on Thursday, seemed to be the week for finding books, and book recommendations galore.
It’s possible that this happened because I spent so much time on Amazon.com this week. I did a promotion for Oklahoma! Hex on Tony’s birthday just for fun, but this time, instead of categorizing it under LGBTQ, I chose to pay a little more and run it in the Mystery category.
Well, the results were out of this world! As of this writing, more than 1700 books have been downloaded, and more and more are downloaded each day, and my book spent 5 days at #1 on the Metaphysical Fiction list at Amazon.com!!!
Not only that, but … it’s stayed in the Top Ten on the list ever since!
Plus, people who downloaded Oklahoma! Hex poked around Amazon too, and discovered that Attending Physician and Jezebel Rising, the first-in-series of two other series, are perma-free, and they downloaded those too!
In and amidst all that, I went over all the highlights I’ve kept in books since 2010, and discovered a bunch more resources that I’ve already read for my top-secret new series! I swear, when I do my own work, everything I need falls into my lap.
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A cropped image of the first Mex Mystery
at #1
on Amazon’s Metaphysical Fiction List.
So often in a world dedicated (allegedly)
to The Great God Efficiency,
we forget to celebrate our joys.
Don’t.
It’s all those little joys that add up to a happy life
for you and for everyone else.
Celebrate the small things, Beloved.
I am, without doubt, certain that And is the secret to all we desire.
Let’s commit to practicing And ever more diligently, shall we?
Until next time,
Be Ampersand.
S.