popery potpourri

In Harvard President Lawrence Summers's controversial remarks about the possible differences in intrinsic aptitude between men and women, I was struck by the following:

...the data will, I am confident, reveal that Catholics are substantially underrepresented in investment banking, which is an enormously high-paying
profession in our society; that white men are very substantially underrepresented in the National Basketball Association; and that Jews are very substantially underrepresented in farming and in agriculture.

He's operating under the assumption that all three examples are commonly accepted observations. Sure, there aren't a lot of white basketball stars and there aren't a lot of Jewish farmers but, I asked myself on first reading it, would most people instinctively assent to the assertion that there aren't a lot of Catholic investment bankers? Has anyone ever given thought to that? And, if it is the case, why is it so?

I read those remarks a couple of weeks ago. Then today, at my non-profit job, I was mailing copies of our newsletter to the directors of our partner service agencies. I filled out one envelope for a man named "Joe de Genova" and I thought, "Oh, a nice Italian name." Then the second one, for another social service agency, was to "Sister Paulette LoMonaco." An Italian nun. The Executive Director of the organization I work for is an Irish-American woman named [deleted to protect identity], who used to work for Catholic Charities and wrote her Master's thesis on the Catholic pacifist monk Thomas Merton. Obviously, the Catholics are underrepresented in investment banking because they're too busy helping people!

There are, of course, many ways to be Catholic. You can be Mel Gibson. You can picket carrying pictures of fetuses outside abortion clinics. But it seemed like Larry Summers and I (and perhaps Max Weber?) were on to something.

Tonight I was at a teachers' training for a youth theater program that I volunteer for. I'm one of the founding faculty members in their "Community Performance School," where kids from the outer boroughs are offered theater classes completely free of charge by professional volunteer artists. There's a lot of philosophy behind what this community does and one of the central ideas is "radical acceptance": the kids who work in this and the other youth programs are told to face up to the fact that they are poor, something that is very uncomfortable for them to do sometimes. But the idea is that one can only develop from a realistic understanding of one's actual circumstances. You have to radically accept who you are so that you know where you're coming from.

Conversely, many of the teachers need to accept that they are affluent (I'm not going to use the word "rich", because I'm not and never have been, but I am indeed quite affluent). Not just in monetary terms but (even moreso) in educational and cultural copportunities and experiences. That's what I bring with me when I come to teach these kids. Our facilitator this evening said, "Lots of rich people are taught to feel guilty about their privilege. We don't want anyone to feel that way here. We want them to acknowledge it and share what they've been given with people who don't have it." The idea isn't to understand or to empathize, but to accept that we come from different circumstances, with all that that entails both positively and negatively. I'm giving short shrift to the arguments, but they really do make a lot of sense. They're really right on the money, in fact.

Now, at these teacher trainings I'm always introduced as "the guy who went to Yale and who is a Rhodes Scholar etc. etc." and these other people who don't know me get this picture in their heads of Ivy League privilege. My housemates get that picture of me sometimes, too, I think -- as if I grew up eating Buffalo mozzarella and imported Balsamic vinegar during our weekend trips to Tuscany. I might eat that food now and I did indeed go on a trip with my family to Italy recently, but when I was growing up I was eating Shake n' Bake chicken and I wasn't going on vacations anywhere.

The Shake n' Bake was not about being cheap. We were upper middle class certainly. But that's not the way my father or my aunt behaved. They were more likely to drive a car into the ground or wear a wool sweater until it had almost no armpits before they would buy a new one. My father had famously accrued so much unused vacation time working for the Justice Department that, at one point, he could have taken an entire year off of work with pay. Growing up no one in my family ever treated themselves. We were not spenders, not consumers. We retained that anti-materialist streak which I associate with our Catholicism.

Abstaining. Self-abnegation. These are the hallmarks of my Boston Irish relatives. My grandfather was a butcher and my father worked his way through law school. I, great-grandson of immigrants, was the first in my family to go to an Ivy League school. When I think of my family history, I don't think of myself as a son of privilege. I think of my aunt and uncle who gave up material comforts to join religious orders -- helping the poor, protesting against war and injustice. I think of my father who has spent his entire legal career working for the government, never in private practice, satisfied with his comfortable but hardly exorbitant government-issue salary. They give to charity, they don't buy a lot of stuff. They don't take a lot of time for themselves. In fact, I think a lot of my early resentment of my stepmother (who introduced me, my father and everyone in our family to imported Balsamic vinegar) stemmed from my sense that she was corrupting my father's anti-materialism. I saw her as an agent of bourgeoisification.

In these discussions of "privilege" that we were having at the teacher training, I inevitably felt like shouting out, "OK, so I didn't grow up in the inner-city, I don't have any realtives who were incarcerated, but I'm not your typical white rich kid either!" I want to make these distinctions, want to specify that, although I may never have felt material deprivation, I am also not accustomed to extreme luxury. Those are my instincts, but then I check myself. On the spectrum of privileged white youths mine may not have been extravgant but it was more than comfortable.

The biggest privilege that I never appreciated until this year was not having to take out any school loans or financial aid. This was partly because I was an only child, partly because I could apply my deceased mother's Social Security dividends to my education, but it was mostly because my father was well-off enough to pay. And so I graduated without any debt. I was then privileged to be able to choose a job doesn't pay much without worrying how I would pay off my loans. I got a whole mess of academic opportunities, I was exposed gratis to whole lot of broadening experiences that helped me get the kind of jobs I'm doing now. I worked really hard, but I was starting out from a very favorable position.

What does all of this have to do with being Catholic? I guess I've digressed a little. But these reflections have helped me understand some aspects of the cultural divide between me and, say, my black and Latino co-workers who earn the same salary I do and pay out regularly for big-ticket status items like an IPod or DirectTV or designer label jackets. It's a sign of pride, coming from the communities they grew up in, to be able to buy those things, to have earned the money to buy them. I, on the other hand, am inclined to want to give things away, to survive with as few material goods as possible. When you consider my educational background, I'm deliberately choosing to work for a salary well below my earning potential which, to a lot of people with less than me, wouldn't make much sense.

This is where Larry Summers doesn't get the whole story. (Almost nothing, I'm starting to realize, is really explained by "intrinsic" qualities.) I might be inclined to live the way I do because I was raised Catholic, but I'm able to choose it because of all the opportunities I've been given from childhood onward. Opportunities that I did absolutely nothing to deserve.