Compare Migrant Mother with the Women of World War II Monument (p. 521). Could Lange's photograph and/or the monument be classified as a type of propaganda? If so, how?
What might Mohandas Gandhi (p. 560) or Garrett Hardin (p. 582) say upon seeing this image? How does it affirm or rebut the arguments that they make?
WRITING ABOUT THE TEXT
Write an essay in which you interpret Migrant Mother by carefully examining its formal elements, such as shading, lighting, balance, composition, and contrast. Explain how the formal elements of the image reinforce its theme.
Show Migrant Mother to friends, roommates, or family members who may not be familiar with the picture and ask them what they think it is about. Do not share the title or any information about the photo. Then write an essay in which you compare and contrast their responses. Why do you think they respond as they do?
Research when and where Migrant Mother was originally published and write an essay explaining the impact (or lack of impact) that it had on its original audience.
simone weil
Equality
[CIRCA 1940]
SIMONE WEIL (1909-1943) was born to a wealthy family in Paris. Her parents were Jewish but not observant, and Weil grew up without religious instruction. She was, however, encouraged in her love of languages and classical scholarship, and she mastered ancient Greek and several other languages by age twelve. She attended the best schools in Paris and, in 1928, placed first in the rigorous entrance examination to the elite Ecole Normale Superieure—ahead of her fellow future philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, who placed second.
Weil was initially attracted to Marxism and radical politics, and she remained active in workers' causes throughout her life. She became disillusioned with Marxism, however, and after a series of intense personal religious experiences, declared her conversion to Christianity in 1938. Weil never joined a church, insisting that Christianity's essence was an unmediated personal experience with God. She also believed that a Christian's life must reflect his or her beliefs. Though she had a graduate degree in philosophy from an elite institution, she frequently applied to do manual labor in factories in order to commune with the workers, and donated a large portion of her income as a teacher to the poor.
After Germany invaded France in 1940, Weil went to England, where she worked for the French Resistance. She was soon diagnosed with tuberculosis. Believing that it would be immoral for her to indulge in physical comforts while her fellow French citizens were suffering under Nazi occupation, she disregarded her doctors' orders to maintain a healthy diet. Instead she subjected herself to near starvation, which hastened her death.
When Weil died, her writings were known only to a few close friends. Since her death, however, selections from her unfinished manuscripts, her personal notebooks, and lecture notes taken by her students have secured her reputation as one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century. In the selection excerpted here Weil tries to reconcile the human need for equality with the existing condition of inequality in human societies. To explain this discrepancy, Weil divides inequality into two categories: quantitative inequality, which arises from the inevitable difference in human talents, abilities, occupations, and access to resources, and qualitative inequality, which arises only when we assign different values to people as a result of these differences.
Equality is a vital need of the human soul. It consists in a recognition, at once public, general, effective, and genuinely expressed in institutions and customs, that the same amount of respect and consideration is due to every human being because this respect is due to the human being as such and is not a matter of degree.
It follows that the inevitable differences among men ought never to imply any difference in the degree of respect. And so that these differences may not be felt to bear such an implication, a certain balance is necessary between equality and inequality.
A certain combination of equality and inequality is formed by equality of opportunity. If no matter who can attain the social rank corresponding to the function he is capable of filling, and if education is sufficiently generalized so that no one is prevented from developing any capacity simply on account of his birth, the prospects are the same for every child. In this way, the prospects for each man are the same as for any other man, both as regards himself when young, and as regards his children later on.
But when such a combination acts alone, and not as one factor among other factors, it ceases to constitute a balance and contains great dangers.
To begin with, for a man who occupies an inferior position and suffers from it to 5 know that his position is a result of his incapacity and that everybody is aware of the fact is not any consolation, but an additional motive of bitterness; according to the individual character, some men can thereby be thrown into a state of depression, while others can be encouraged to commit crime.
Then, in social life, a sort of aspirator toward the top is inevitably created. If a descending movement does not come to balance this ascending movement, the social body becomes sick. To the extent to which it is really possible for the son of a farm laborer to become one day a minister, to the same extent should it really be possible for the son of a minister to become one day a farm laborer. This second possibility could never assume any noticeable proportions without a very dangerous degree of social constraint.
This sort of equality, if allowed full play by itself, can make social life fluid to the point of decomposing it.
There are less clumsy methods of combining equality with differentiation. The first is by using proportion. Proportion can be defined as the combination of equality with inequality, and everywhere throughout the universe it is the sole factor making for balance.
Applied to the maintenance of social equilibrium, it would impose on each man burdens corresponding to the power and well-being he enjoys, and corresponding risks in cases of incapacity or neglect. For instance, an employer who is incapable or guilty of an offense against his workmen ought to be made to suffer far more, both in the spirit and in the flesh, than a workman who is incapable or guilty of an offense against his employer. Furthermore, all workmen ought to know that this is so. It would imply, on the one hand, certain rearrangement with regard to risks, on the other hand, in criminal law, a conception of punishment in which social rank, as an aggravating circumstance, would necessarily play an important part in deciding what the penalty was to be. All the more reason, therefore, why the exercise of important public functions should carry with it serious personal risks.
Another way of rendering equality compatible with differentiation would be to 10 take away as far as possible all quantitative character from differences. Where there is only a difference in kind, not in degree, there is no inequality at all.
But making money the sole, or almost the sole, motive of all actions, the sole, or almost the sole, measure of all things, the poison of inequality has been introduced everywhere. It is true that this inequality is mobile; it is not attached to persons, for money is made and lost; it is none the less real.
There are two sorts of inequality, each with its corresponding stimulant. A more or less stable inequality, like that of ancient France, produces an idolizing of superiors— not without a mixture of repressed hatred—and a submission to their commands. A mobile, fluid inequality produces a desire to better oneself. It is no nearer to equality than is stable inequality, and is every bit as unwholesome. The Revolution of 1789, in putting forward equality, only succeeded in reality in sanctioning the substitution of one form of inequality for another.