their own best interests.
HE CONSULTS with his advisor. Professor Mieke Van Dijk, she of the sublime Dutch bob, clipped consonants, and soft-core softened vowels. In fact, she makes him confer with her every two weeks, in her office up in College Ten, hoping the enforced check-in will jump-start his research.
“You are dragging your feet over nothing.”
In fact, he has his feet up, reclining on her Victorian daybed across the office from her desk, as if she’s psychoanalyzing him. It amuses them both.
“Dragging . . . ? Not at all. I am utterly paralyzed.”
“But why? You make too big a deal about this. Think of a thesis . . .”—she can’t pronounce the th—“as a long seminar project. You don’t have to save the world.”
“I don’t? Can I at least save a nation-state or two?”
She laughs; her wide overbite quickens his pulse. “Listen, Adam. Pretend this has nothing to do with your career. Nothing to do with any professional approval. What do you, personally, want to discover? What would give you enjoyment to study for a couple of years?”
He watches the words spill from that pretty mouth, free from the social-scientific jargon that she tends to drop into in seminars. “This enjoyment you speak about . . .”
“Tsh. You want to know something.”
He wants to know whether she has ever, even once, thought of him sexually. It isn’t inconceivable. She’s only a decade older than he is. And she is—he wants to say robust. He feels a weird need to tell her how he got here, in her office, looking for a thesis topic. Wants to draw his entire intellectual history in a straight line—from daubing nail polish on the abdomens of ants to watching his beloved undergraduate mentor die—then ask her where the line leads next.
“I’m interested in . . . unblinding.” He steals a look at her. If only people, like some invertebrates, would just turn raging purple when they felt attraction. It would make the entire species so much less neurotic.
She purses her lips. She must know how good that looks on her. “Unblinding? I’m sure that must mean something.”
“Can people come to independent moral decisions that run counter to their tribe’s beliefs?”
“You want to study transformative potential as a function of strong normative in-group favoritism.”
He’d nod, but the jargon bugs the crap out of him. “It’s like this. I think of myself as a good man. A good citizen. But say I’m a good citizen of early Rome, when a father had the power, and sometimes the duty, to put his child to death.”
“I see. And you, a good citizen, are motivated to preserve positive distinctiveness. . . .”
“We’re trapped. By social identity. Even when there are big, huge truths staring us in . . .” He hears his peers jeering, Bias Boy.
“Well, no. Clearly not, or in-group realignment would never happen. Transformation of social identity.”
“Does it?”
“Of course! Here in America, people went from believing that women are too frail to vote to having a major-party vice presidential candidate, in one lifetime. From Dred Scott to Emancipation in a few years. Children, foreigners, prisoners, women, blacks, the disabled and mentally ill: they’ve all gone from property to personhood. I was born at a time when the idea of a chimpanzee getting a hearing in a court of law seemed totally absurd. By the time you’re my age, we’ll wonder how we ever denied such animals their standing as intelligent creatures.”
“How old are you, anyway?”
Professor Van Dijk laughs. Her fine high cheekbones pink out; he’s sure of it. Tough to hide, with that complexion. “Topic, please.”
“I’d like to determine the personality factors that make it possible for some individuals to wonder how everyone can be so blind . . .”
“. . . while everyone else is still trying to stabilize in-group loyalties. Now we get somewhere. This could be a topic. With much more narrowing and definition. You could look at the next step in this same historical progression of consciousness. Study those people who support a position that any reasonable person in our society thinks is crazy.”
“For instance?”
“We’re living at a time when claims are being made for a moral authority that lies beyond the human.”
One smooth tensing of his abdominal muscles, and he sits up. “What do you mean?”
“You’ve seen the news. People up and down this coast are risking their lives for plants. I read a story last week—a man who had his legs sheared off by a machine he tried to chain himself to.”
Adam