What is the role of fantasy in ethical affairs?
Fantasy is defined as “the faculty or activity of imagining things, especially things that are impossible or improbable.”
As a youth, I spent quite a few years in Brazil. One of the biggest traditions there is carnaval, the riotous days leading up to Ash Wednesday. Everyone dresses in outrageous costume and mask: the poor dress up as rich people and the rich dress as poor; men dress as curvaceous women.
The movie Black Orpheus (1959) is worth watching to capture some of the madness of that time of year. The song A Felicidade (“The Happiness”) from the movie states that:
Tristeza nao tem fim, felicidade sim....
(Sadness has no end, happiness always does....)
The happiness of the poor appears
As the great illusion of carnival
The people work the entire year
For one moment of dreaming
To dress in costume like a king or a pirate...
And everything will be over on Ash Wednesday.
During one carnaval I purchased and used a popular Saci mask. Saci is an impish devil who does irritating things around the house. Saci originates in indigenous South American folklore, and was adapted by African slaves. Should a white person be wearing such a mask? Brazil is a very racist country, but it never occurred to me or anyone I encountered that people during carnaval should not fantasize about being a black, or anything else, for that matter. That was the very point of entering the mask-space—to take on a new persona.
To Adam Smith, of course, sympathizing with another’s point of view is a starting point for developing an ethical perspective. In my fifth grade class in São Paulo in 1964, my teacher was a black South African. I had managed to get ahold of a copy of Black Like Me (1961) from my parents’ library. In the (now famous) diary, journalist John Howard Griffin goes undercover in the 1950s by taking medication that darkens his skin, and makes him “black” in the Jim Crow south. The point of his journal was to record his experiences of being perceived as being of a different race. This was an inflammatory book to some, and Griffin moved to Mexico for a while to avoid the threats he received. [Apparently an earlier journalist, Ray Springle, had done a similar “stunt,” recounted in In the Land of Jim Crow (1949).]
In any event, I had my copy of Black Like Me at my desk and suddenly my teacher came down the aisle toward my desk. I panicked, worrying that the very subject of race might come between us. I clumsily tried to hide my book. But why? Isn’t the experience of a white going undercover as a black a worthy and defensible intellectual experience? On the other hand, was it simply voyeurism, which should be condemned? As an 10 year old, my feelings were certainly confused. My kind teacher appeared not to notice the book.
The Virginia’s governor’s current predicament is nothing like this. The abhorrent photograph in his medical school yearbook shows someone in black face alongside another in KKK garb. This was presumably thought to be amusing because of the paradox of these two people drinking together at a cocktail party. This is voyeurism because the episode “allows us to experience all the excitement of disaster, catastrophe, and pain, to witness the most horrible human events, without any danger of feeling real pain,” according to Gerald Mast.
Perhaps this is the crux of the matter: a voyeur is in no danger of feeling real emotion from the experience, and hence of engaging in meaningful sympathy. The person in black face in the photo knew that he would not be lynched by the KKK clansman; it mocked the subject. But John Howard Griffin in Black Like Me had no such guarantee he would live to tell about it.
Dressing as another (or putting on a mask) can be either abominable or defensible depending on one’s intentions and motives. If the goal is to understand and sympathize, as a prelude to perhaps changing wrongful laws and social norms, I think we might all agree it is defensible. But sometimes there is no clear dividing line between what is serious and what is frivolous. Fantasy that stokes the ethical imagination has a role in life, even if play is not for the loftiest goals.
The Virginia governor clings to his job, but probably not for much longer. As a friend texted me today, the photos in the yearbook went way over the edge, even for three decades ago:
“The issue here is gross insensitivity, mockery, dismissal of the pain of others and putting on ‘the mask’ not to enhance empathy, but to make fun of, to degrade, to even, maybe, elevate oneself in one's racist culture (even if one does not consciously see the racism therein... ).”
Well said.
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