education

The Old College Try

By in education, foolosophy, work

Joseph Epstein:

Intelligent people who hadn’t gone to college began to feel a great hole in their lives, and those who had gone could usually be relied upon to hide from them what is all too sadly the truth: they really haven’t missed all that much. Paul Goodman, the 1930s radical who became something of a guru during the student rebellions of the late 1960s and early ’70s, used to enjoy saying that all going to college meant was that in doing so a person showed how badly he or she wanted to succeed in society as currently constituted. Going to college entails a large expense, lots of useless work, and the acceptance of endless onerous, preposterous trivialities, all of which, Goodman liked pointing out, showed that any young man or woman who was willing to put up with this nonsense could be expected to put up with the even greater nonsense of boring and meaningless work later in life. College, in this view, functioned chiefly to turn out useful, moderately high-level drones, finely honed tools of capitalism.
…Of course, undergraduate education is only ostensibly about producing the sound paper on T.S. Eliot or the Renaissance or the Reformation. What it’s really about, or at any rate is supposed to be about, is the development of young minds, teaching them how to think independently, how to combine common sense with proper skepticism, the whole given a fine texture by the attainment of an at first widened and later (after college, acquired on one’s own) greatly deepened culture. But what percentage of the 65 percent of Americans who regularly participate in one form or another of higher education do you suppose derive anything resembling such things from their education? I would set it at somewhere between 1 or 2 percent, though that may be too generous. Most people come away from college, happy souls, quite unscarred by what has gone on in the classroom. The education and culture they are presumably exposed to at college never lay a glove on them. This is the big dirty secret of higher education in America.
This doesn’t mean that their having gone to college isn’t worth it. Not at all. On a strict accounting, a college education, expensively priced though it nowadays generally is, probably pays off as well as any investment. Endless studies show that young men and women who attend college earn hundreds of thousands of dollars more over a lifetime than those who, for one reason or another, do not go to college. Why should this be so? For the same reason that degrees in journalism, master’s degrees in business, and other (shall we politely say?) not strictly necessary degrees make for success: because, that is, people who have already paid for these overpriced appurtenances wish others to do so, forming a (not so) little group of those who have already pledged the fraternity.
I had an artist friend in high school who said he wanted to go to college even though he didn’t need it for his career plans, “just for the college experience”. (He wasn’t a drinker, or even overly social, so I guess he was referring to the intellectual aspect.) I think I know what he meant; I still enjoy looking through the course offerings that come in the mail from all the nearby colleges and daydreaming about possibly taking the classes that catch my eye if time and energy will ever allow. But dabbling in the odd class with no real remunerative potential would be good enough for me; I know too many people who invested four-to-eight years and tens of thousands of dollars into their education, only to end up with meaningless jobs they hate, a mountain of debt on their backs, and no capacity for intellectual curiosity or enjoyment anymore.

Kiss My Grits

By in augean stables, education, foolosophy, ohferfucksake, old dixie, race, tribalism, waiting for the barbarians

You’ve got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know… morons.

– Blazing Saddles

I said before that one of the reasons I wasn’t all that impressed with Joe Bageant was that he just struck me as a more affable James Howard Kunstler. Heywood crystallizes one of the other reasons for me: he also makes me picture a slightly more avuncular Dave “Mudcat” Saunders. Can you tell which one is which?

1)
I have bitched and moaned for years about the lack of tolerance in the elitist wing of the Democratic Party, or what I refer to as the “Metropolitan Opera Wing”. These are the people who talk of tolerance but the only true tolerance they ever exhibit is for their own pseudo-intellectual arrogance.
–snip–
I am certain I will get personally attacked for this next statement, but in all honesty, I don’t care what the “Metropolitan Wing” of my party thinks. I don’t like them. The damage the pseudo-intellectuals have done to my party by abandoning tolerance, combined with their erroneous stereotyping of my people and culture, is something that brings out my incivility. In his column, Joe said, “…the smart stuff is being drowned out by a fierce, bullying, often witless tone of intolerance that has overtaken the left-wing sector of the blogosphere.” Amen. I must add that this same intellectual arrogance and intolerance overtook the party years ago, and for that very reason, my people in rural America left the tent.
So to those bloggers who believe in a straight-forward dialogue and exchange of ideas, God bless you and thank you. Together, you’re coming up with a lot of good stuff, and frankly, much of it has been helpful to me. At the same time, those Democratic bloggers, who have appointed themselves as intellectually superior and believe the only way to win an argument is to shot the loudest with personal attacks, you can go to Hell.
2)
Most educated American liberals, however, believe simply being progressive makes them, by default, the nation’s saviors — morally and intellectually right in all things. As proof, they read more and, allegedly, are more open minded than most conservatives, except when it comes to their daughter dating a redneck named Ernest who lives in a trailer court behind the strip mall. They are certainly among the educated class in a country known for its lousy schools and a dull, sated and unquestioning public. Education and access to education are now our fundamental class delineators. Higher education is now for the privileged. And that privilege, almost regardless of profession or career, is a future that depends on government. Liberal or conservative, it matters little. In fact, this privileged class votes Democratic more predictably than the working class, Hispanics or Blacks.
So when educated liberals look up from their copy of The Nation or the Jon Stewart show, they behold a chilling sight: Beefy mobs waving teabags and demanding tax cuts to help pay for new schools and bridges, Sarah Palin emerging from the ashes of the McCain campaign to become the high priestess of the uncurried tribes, with a Mormon named Glenn Beck exhorting millions of fundamentalists to seize the country. They feel that something has gone terribly wrong with America.
Immediately they conclude that it is the American people’s fault through their backwardness, incomprehension and misdirected anger, and that maybe it serves them right for not rallying behind the flying progressive standard…”Ah yes,” they wailed, the people have let us down. They are absolutely disgusting!” liberals agreed. And they still agree. Read the comments on Huffington Post or Daily Kos.
Or look at the arrogance of Barack Obama’s characterization of American heartlanders “clinging to God and guns.” Which we do. However, implicit in his statement was that both God and guns are indicators of an ignorant loser class. When opponents scalded him for his remarks, he justified them by pointing out he had said, “what everybody knows is true.” Meaning everybody in his class, the educated liberal class.
Fellows, err, excuse me, “fellers”, I’m a fairly ordinary guy myself. I generally wear t-shirts and ragged cargo shorts (or jeans in the cold months). I don’t even own a dress shirt, slacks or shoes, and I’m not sure where I last saw my one tie. Got me a scruffy beard and longish hair that only gets trimmed every several months. Never owned a new car in my life; my current ride has over 400K on the original engine. I’ve repeatedly chosen to do grunt work rather than take higher-paying office jobs. I may listen to opera and classical music, but I have Southern rock and old blues on my iPod too. I’ve lived in your home state of Virginia my whole life, and I currently live in a small redneck town that makes Mudcat’s hometown of Roanoke look cosmopolitan by comparison, so I’ll measure my gen-yew-wine Southern bona fides against y’alls any time you want, and I’m here to say: you’re both full of shit.
Where to even begin? Mudcat, ol’ buddy, it’s amusing to read this Foxworthy-in-a-foul-mood article from a couple years ago and see how ridiculously, stupidly wrong you were. Obama was going to lose Virginia for not pandering more to appeal to rural whites? Wrong. His efforts to get out the vote via the Internet were quixotic? Wrong again. And you get paid to be a political consultant?
Bonus fun: he apparently thinks Obama actually gave a shit, deep down in his heart of hearts, about “social justice and economic fairness”, and just failed to articulate that well enough. Yet another progressive who insists on projecting what they want to see onto the man, only to act shocked when he acts like the pro-corporate, bought-and-paid-for tool of Wall Street he’s always been. Then, this self-appointed Southern spokesman, with his battle-flag bedspread and one-piece jammies with the ass flap hanging open, acts like Democrats are the ones to blame for the “cultural wedge” between them and the Scots-Irish vote. Motherfucker, there’s no way you could possibly be that goddamned ignorant, so I’m forced to conclude you’re being disingenuous on purpose. Nixon correctly saw that idiots like the rural Saltine crackers you so desperately want to idealize would happily ignore their own financial well-being if they could at least feel superior to faggots, feminazis, furriners and niggers, that they would be so busy taking the crumbs from Republican hands to feed their insatiable, resentful, inferiority complex that they’d hardly notice their jobs all being shipped overseas by the same people who pat them on the head and praise them for being the moral backbone of society. Hell, it’s hard to begrudge the man for seeing a golden opportunity and grabbing it with both hands. And I’m still waiting to hear someone reconcile this fabled common-sense, no-bullshit, straight-shooting, deep-fried heartland wisdom that I’m supposed to genuflect before with the fact that these people have shelves sagging under the weight of countless bottles of snake oil, and pockets perpetually empty by means of every shell game, sleight of hand, cheap card trick and distracting shiny object that hucksters flash in front of their faces.
Joe, ol’ pal, if you honestly think the legions of imbeciles and Randroids at Glenn Beck’s bizarro-MLK rally in Washington today, these Rip Van Winkles who snoozed through eight years of the big-government, profligate-spending Bush administration, only to conveniently wake up in mid-January 2009 with some throbbing, fiscal-conservative morning wood, give a drizzling shit about tax cuts for schools and bridges rather than simply wanting to make sure that those you-know-whos don’t get their swarthy mitts on any government money, then I’m afraid you’ve spent too much time in the Central American sun without a floppy hat. Fucksakes, man, most of them think public schools are fascist-communist indoctrination camps where children are taught how to desecrate the Bible and have orgies with barnyard animals! And goddamnit, I’m really getting sick of having to defend Obama here, but it was clear at the time that his comment about “clinging to God and guns” referred to the same phenomenon we just addressed: people who spend their time in mortal fear of nonexistent federal stormtroopers coming to confiscate their Bibles and hunting rifles, never managing to notice that the people spreading these rumors are the same ones whose economic philosophy is responsible for there being no more decent manufacturing jobs available for them. But oh, yes, by all means, don’t say anything that might suggest that you think people could stand to rethink some convictions or change anything about themselves, you fancy-pants, big-city, add-your-preferred-gay-baiting-epithet-here liberal. Don’t challenge the gospel of Southern exceptionalism, nawsir. I swear by the treasonous bones of Bobby Lee, I wish someone would show me the uptight P.C. liberal who is anywhere near as insecure and hypersensitive as your typical “Southern by the grace of God” yahoos.
And can we finally dispense with the idea that education is something to act ashamed of? Well, first, actually, let’s define our terms more clearly. Most of what passes for “higher education”, that is, most of what people go to college in order to achieve, is a meaningless diploma that will allow them access to a world of pointless office work and imaginary numbers where they can earn enough of a paycheck to start paying down the massive debt accrued in the process of earning that meaningless diploma in the first place. Okay, perhaps there is a reason to be a bit ashamed at having bought into this scam in the first place.
But I never went to a four-year college. I took classes for fun at community college for a few years, for a grand total of less than a thousand dollars altogether. But aside from the enjoyment I got out of philosophy class, I don’t consider that time to be all that important. Most of my education, such as it is, has been self-directed. Yes, it’s true, I sit at home on weekends and read books that no one else within a few neighboring counties would be interested in rather than hanging out at the general store shooting the shit about guns, NASCAR and Jeebus. I don’t make an issue of it, but if that ruffles your feathers, if that somehow offends you and makes you want to spit in the dirt at my feet, squint and grumble, “Boy, yew think yer better’n me?”, well, fuck the hell out of you, Festus. I don’t have time or patience to worry about validating your delicate self-esteem. I accept, like Socrates, that the only thing I really know is how little I actually know (gosh, should I apologize for referencing some faggoty-ass Greek philosopher instead of Lynyrd Skynyrd?) But I do my best to try to know what I’m talking about on any topic I want to bring up, and I’m always aware that I could be wrong.
Simple, right? Aren’t all adults like this? But as Heywood says so well, the problem with the “uneducated” folk isn’t that they don’t hold an advanced degree, or that they don’t read obscure political or philosophical tracts, it’s that they have a narcissistic, childish mindset that insists on reality reshaping itself in accordance with their inchoate wishes. Higher education isn’t necessary to live a good life or be an intelligent person, but pulling your head out of your ass most certainly is. And therein lies the rub: they really do believe, contra the received wisdom, that they are entitled to their own facts, not just their own opinions. They act like brainwashed cult members, only seeing and hearing what they want to see and hear, deriding anything that tells them differently, however gently, as enemy-liberal-queer propaganda by definition, proudly asserting that they knew all that’s worth knowing by third grade, and to top it all off, they demand to be respected and approved of for being fatuous, cement-headed morons. It’s not enough to let them be themselves and do their own thing. You have to constantly agree that yes, your knee-jerk prejudices and half-baked opinions are far superior to anything I’ve read in a book or thought up myself. You’re right, I’m some kind of pathetic city-slicker because I’m not interested in car engines or chewing tobacco. Lincoln’s bewildered complaint from a century and a half ago about slavery still rings true:
Even though the Southern people will not so much as listen to us, let us calmly consider their demands, and yield to them if, in our deliberate view of our duty, we possibly can. Judging by all they say and do, and by the subject and nature of their controversy with us, let us determine, if we can, what will satisfy them?
Will they be satisfied if the Territories be unconditionally surrendered to them? We know they will not. In all their present complaints against us, the Territories are scarcely mentioned. Invasions and insurrections are the rage now. Will it satisfy them if, in the future, we have nothing to do with invasions and insurrections? We know it will not. We so know because we know we never had anything to do with invasions and insurrections; and yet this total abstaining does not exempt us from the charge and the denunciation.
The question recurs, what will satisfy them? Simply this: we must not only let them alone, but we must, somehow, convince them that we do let them alone. [Applause.] This, we know by experience is no easy task. We have been so trying to convince them from the very beginning of our organization, but with no success. In all our platforms and speeches, we have constantly protested our purpose to let them alone; but this has had no tendency to convince them. Alike unavailing to convince them is the fact that they have never detected a man of us in any attempt to disturb them.
These natural and apparently adequate means all failing, what will convince them? This, and this only; cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly — done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated — we must place ourselves avowedly with them.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la meme chose.
I once briefly worked with a pair of rednecks, Alan and Phil, the middle and youngest, respectively, of three brothers. One day, they came in to work positively jubilant, bragging about something they’d accomplished. It seems they’d pulled off a scheme to frame their eldest brother for something so that Phil could steal his girlfriend while he was in jail. But wait! There’s more! The reason they were so gleeful about it was that they had peddled their story to Jerry Springer’s people and had been contacted about appearing on the show (I don’t know if that ever panned out for them). This was their dream, to throw chairs and punches at each other on national TV in front of a crowd of howling fucktards. But I’m supposed to act embarrassed over knowing how to read and think beyond the confines of clannish identity politics. Right.
To further flesh out the character of these fine, upstanding salt-of-the-earth Myrrhkins, let me add that I once had the dubious pleasure of hearing Alan pontificate one day, shortly before the 2000 election, about how Ronald Reagan was the greatest president we’d ever had. I wonder if Bageant or Mudcat would care to take a stab at guessing what this inbred cretin could have possibly found appealing about a president who did absolutely nothing to benefit him or his kinfolk? I’m sure it had nothing whatsoever to do with race, I can tell you that.
I could have easily enough been like that. Like I said, I live right in the epicenter of it. My immediate family, while not ignorant rednecks, are the most rabid, insane teabaggers you could ever hope to avoid. Don’t even fucking try to tell me about arrogance and intolerance. No amount of joking about cousins marrying or trailer parks comes close to being as stifling and oppressive as living among these people while daring to be different.

The How and Why of Writing

By in calvin and hobbes, education, language, nietzsche, writing

HOW:

They were a lively group of students, and we chatted for an hour, discussing topics we were all interested in. They asked smart questions.

When we were wrapping up, I asked them a question: “What is your relationship to reading and writing?” At that moment, they morphed from T-shirt-clad physical specimens and became generic graduate students, indistinguishable from all-in-black, cigarette-smoking studiers of literary theory and bearded-and-geeky future scientists. It’s all we do, they wailed, and it’s hard.

What’s hard?

The journal articles he makes us read (they said, directing accusing fingers at my colleague) are dense and boring. We’re getting good information, but it can be painful. And, they said, we have to learn to write like that.

No, I said, you don’t.

I’ve heard that song from graduate students in every discipline, and from faculty members, junior and senior, at universities across the country. The message: You have to write the same way as others in your field. You must use multisyllabic words, complex phrasing, and sentences that go on for days, because that’s how you show you’re smart. If you’re too clear, if your sentences are too simple, your peers won’t take you seriously.

— Rachel Toor

Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity. For the crowd believes that if it cannot see to the bottom of something it must be profound. It is so timid and dislikes going into the water.

— Nietzsche

I’m not an academic. As I’ve said, I never even attended college for the purpose of serious study or career preparation. I’m an autodidact if you want to be gracious, a dilettante if you don’t. But the quest to expand the horizons of one’s knowledge is a demanding one nonetheless, so I have done my best to read what the real academics have written on subjects I’m interested in, as well as shoot the breeze conduct rigorous interviews with a few of of my friends with advanced degrees and/or former academic careers dozens and dozens of prominent intellectuals throughout academia, and what they’ve told me has dovetailed with my own experience: there’s a whole realm that consists of technically smart people who have turned away from trying to make any real difference in the world with their knowledge, and spend their time in a cerebral circle-jerk, talking to themselves and others like them in an inscrutable private language. I like to flatter myself that I’m smarter than the average bear, but I’ve read academic tracts that left me glassy-eyed, with a trickle of drool from the corner of my mouth and thin tendrils of smoke trailing from my ears.

It’s a shame, because while I do agree that one should strive to be understood, especially when the goal is to actually impart information, I’ve really come to appreciate most of all when someone can enlighten and entertain in equal measures. The problem isn’t just that too much intellectual writing is devoted to pointless meandering through labyrinthine thickets of signified signifiers signifying signification, it’s that it has no style, no grace, no sense of humor. Pace George Orwell and his rules that Toor quotes, writing can be clear and artful; there’s no need to have such a ruthless, stripped-down, utilitarian aesthetic that always aims for the lowest common denominator.

WHY:

I have heard it said that the defining characteristic of a writer is that writers absolutely must write. They can’t help it. It’s a compulsion. By that metric, I am not a writer. By that metric, I am pretty much the opposite of what a writer is. Most of the time, I have to be forced to write. This post, for instance, is prompted by my desperately needing to work on something else with a looming deadline. Yes, it’s still writing, but my only alternative is doing the dishes. There have been days this week where I chose a sinkful of dishes instead.

I like writing. I’m good at it. I’ve come to realize that my writing has made a few incremental changes for good in this world: swaying people’s opinions, helping people better appreciate some neglected things.

But do I need to write? No. I have been happy with my life without writing being a part of it.

— Chris Clarke

B: But why, then, do you write? – A: Well, my friend, to be quite frank: so far, I have not discovered any other way of getting rid of my thoughts. – B: And why do you want to get rid of them? – A: Why do I want to? Do I want to? I have to.

— Nietzsche

>I never was one for keeping diaries or journals, and in my school days, writing was just another task to be done for a grade, with as little effort or fuss as possible. Until my late twenties, in fact, the most writing I ever really did was in the form of short poems or song lyrics. But having spent a few years now making a more-or-less regular effort to set down my thoughts on whatever topic catches my fancy, I don’t know what I’d do without it. Writing is how I solidify my thoughts; it’s a tool to focus my awareness. Along with music, of course, it’s how I get right with myself and the world, a way to find harmony and beauty that I can’t find anywhere else.

I don’t have to write in the sense of a compulsion, and I’ve never bought into the oft-heard advice that says aspiring writers have to devote a certain amount of time each day to writing a certain number of words. The calendar has nothing to do with it. If I don’t have anything really pressing to say, or if I’m too busy or tired, writing can wait. I enjoy the act of writing, and it really does energize me and lift my spirits to grapple with thoughts before finally expressing them in words to my satisfaction, but when I’m just going through the motions to force myself to conform to some artificial timetable, it’s worse than if I just wait however long it takes until inspiration strikes. If I felt the need to mindlessly jabber just to distract myself from the unsettling sound of the wind whistling through my head, I’d have a Twitter account. But for me, thinking is just as much part of the process as the actual work at the keyboard. You need to allow time for new information to filter in, for new experiences to occur, for new perspectives to spontaneously emerge before you can write anything meaningful. I find the best way to do that is to stop worrying about what I want to say, and go listen to what other people have to say. The interconnectedness of the blogosphere serves the purpose of keeping my mind stimulated. And while I’ve never wanted to be the kind of blogger that has to have an immediate comment on every piece of breaking news, there is a certain drive to stay abreast of what others are talking about, to see if you can add your two cents to a conversation before it dissipates, and that, more than saying, “I have to write a hundred words a day, no exceptions,” is what helps with the discipline of it.

So while I have yet to feel like a slave to my keyboard or my blog, writing is the necessary third link in the chain, following observation and reflection, that makes me feel complete. That process never stops. In that sense, then, yes, I have to do it.

My Library Was Dukedom Large Enough

By in bonsai minimalism, education, foolosophy, santutthi

Maybe I’m still a kook, because now, years later, my convictions about the ready availability of knowledge remain pretty much unchanged. Devoid of a degree as I am, I have never stopped reading, inquiring, and exploring the world of ideas and facts. All this is not to deny, of course, that formal education is good in its way (and naturally some specialties — law and medicine most notably — absolutely require old-fashioned collegiate training). But I still believe deeply in the worth and merit of impractical learning — that is, learning not yoked with any particular worldly ambition — and I wish that this kind of “aimless” learning could find better cultural legitimacy.

Hear, hear. Many thanks to Shanna for passing along this essay to me. I have been disappointing family, friends and teachers for a few decades with my insouciance toward “applying myself”, which is to say, my refusal to try to make as much money as I can with whatever talents I have. I seem to have had a congenital aversion to that mentality, passive while I was younger, but one that has hardened into a gleeful enjoyment of thumbing my nose at conventional attitudes regarding education and money. And while I have yet to feel embarrassed about being a “loser” when it comes to worldly success, I have felt that way numerous times upon realizing that I’m wasting my enthusiasm for learning and thinking while trying to share it with someone who couldn’t care less. I share Susan Jacoby’s lament about how hard it is to find people with the intelligence and passion to discuss rarefied topics with such a breezy familiarity:

As the art of live conversation continues its decline, it is saddening to discover that some of the best examples of old-fashioned, discursive, passionate intellectual conversation can be found today only in books. For a glimpse of the way intellectuals used to talk, not only to one another but to anyone else who happened to be within range, one might consult a splendid, concise 1988 portrait of the maverick journalist I.F. Stone, compiled from taped conversations between Stone and the author, Andrew Patner. Stone, an autodidact who dropped out of college in his junior year, was talking about his research for a book about the trial of Socrates:

“I’ve often said that no one has gotten away with so much egregious nonsense out of sheer charm as Plato. It’s nonsense, absolute nonsense. And the devout Platonists — it’s like a cult, they’re like Moonies. I mean, Plato is a fascinating thinker and a marvelous writer and a man of comedic genius. Olympiodorus says that he wanted to be a writer of comedy, of plays and comedy — he’s supposed to have had a copy of Aristophanes on his bed when he died — but when he met Socrates he gave that up….And you have to read him, too, not just for his system or ideas, but for the way he gets at it, for all the by-products, the joy, and the wrestle, so to speak. No other philosopher turned his philosophies into little dramas. That gives them part of their continual charm….The Phaedo is just — I was reading the Phaedo at American University, and I just burst into tears. The kids must have thought I’d gone wacky. It’s very moving. A great drama.

…And so, you understand the Greek theater and its wellsprings of freedom much better when you look at the Roman theater and comedy. And with the Greek law and the Roman law, the procedure and laws of the Greek Assembly and the Roman Assembly….I don’t care much for Rome. Cicero is a big tub of crap. Typical corporation lawyer and ass-kisser of the rich and powerful. But he studied in Athens, a few centuries after the great days, and his philosophical treatises, while they’re not profound, are very valuable. You consult what he has to say in the De natura deorum, De divinatione, and the Tusculan Disputations….I agree with Caesar though. He called the prose style Asiatic, by which he meant overadorned, and I think his speeches are a little too flowery.”

This is what a passionate intellectual conversation sounds like — the genuine learnedness, the intensity, the sense of communion with people who lived and died thousands of years ago. I wish I had been on the other end of that conversation. It’s been a long time since I’ve heard anyone call Plato a purveyor of egregious nonsense, and Cicero was a big ass-kisser. One need look no further for a perfect example of the connection between the decline of reading and the decline of intellectual conversation.

I would say that they’re both connected to the decline of people being interested in anything that isn’t geared toward some tangible measure of success. Who wants to talk about Plato and Roman theater when there’s money to be made? My orthopedic surgeon, an amateur history buff himself, used to always ask about whatever book I was reading while sitting in the room waiting on him, and we’d spend a little time discussing various topics at each visit. Once he finally asked me, “What are you going to do with all this knowledge?” Nothing, really, I said. There were practical obstacles: I didn’t go to college (beyond taking classes for my own pleasure at community college for a few years), and without a degree and some type of specialized skill, there wasn’t any real hope of using my interests to make money. What, is someone going to pay me to sit at home and read a bunch of obscure books? I told him that there were also countless people out there who already knew much more than I did about any given topic, so as far as I was concerned, this was all just for fun and the ability to provide interesting conversation. He didn’t say anything critical of that, but I could tell he thought it was bizarre.

My father once asked me if I regretted not pursuing my love of philosophy to the extent of trying to become a professor myself. I told him that my former professor lived in a small apartment and drove a Ford Pinto; being that I was already in a similar income bracket, why would I want to acquire tens of thousands of dollars in debt for a useless degree on top of it? Another friend of mine, with a Ph.D. in philosophy, has worked all sorts of temp jobs in recent years, including at a convenience store. And yet another friend, in her late thirties, was telling me recently that she’s going to be paying off her student loans until she’s 67. I might not be able to get a high-paying job with only a high-school diploma, but then again, I don’t necessarily need one if I’m not staggering along under the mountain of debt that all my better-educated friends have.

My former neighbor used to good-naturedly lecture me on how I was wasting my time and talents (musical and literary) living an ordinary life doing ordinary things. She was one of those spiritual-not-religious types who hadn’t examined her assumptions closely enough to realize that she still carried a very Christian belief in people having a “calling” that they were obliged to heed. She preferred to say that I had a “gift” for music or writing, but it amounted to the same thing: I was obliged/destined/meant to fulfill those talents to the greatest extent possible, and if I didn’t, I was lying to myself or failing my potential. I used to tweak her in return by saying that no, a “gift” implied a “giver”, and maybe an obligation in return, and since there was no god, I was free to slack off as much as I wanted. And does anyone really need to be reminded how many people have single-mindedly pursued and achieved a goal only to find themselves miserable when it doesn’t measure up to the fantasies they had about it?

Immaturity. Fear of failure. Selfishness. All have been suggested as reasons for my obstinate refusal to allow my “hobbies” to turn into “business”. No one ever seems to consider that maybe having the luxury and freedom to pursue these things at my leisure is what makes them enjoyable and reinvigorating for me. Maybe I just know when I’m already happy, and isn’t that what all our tail-chasing is supposed to be leading toward in the first place?

Comfort Killed the Curiosity

By in education, foolosophy

An interesting lecture on a subject I’m fond of. Seriously, I’ve found that insatiable curiosity paired with longwinded bullshitting ability can trick many people into believing you’re actually smart! Try it sometime.

By background, 99 percent or more of the people who ever lived on the planet by the end of the 18th century could only reflect the social status and pursue as occupations whatever their parents did. Curiosity, which may be a natural condition of children, didn’t apply expansively to adults because in their daily pursuits they had so few choices. Lack of education and social and economic immobility put pervasive constraints on the imagination.

It’s an interesting thought, because I’ve always felt that the opposite is just as true: so many people I know, even if they have a little time and money to spare, simply don’t care to learn anything new once out of school, content to just partake of the endless buffet of entertainment while knowing just enough to keep the paychecks coming.

Unintended Consequences

By in books, education, unintended consequences

Okay. Obligatory disclaimers:

I am all in favor of reading for challenge as much as contentment and escapism. I wholeheartedly concur with Socrates that the unexamined life is not worth living. Turn off the tv, the computer, and go read a book, preferably one that gives you a new way of looking at or thinking about the world.

However.

Yes, they sure did read some subversive material back in the sixties. And what good did it do? The hippies turned into the yuppies. David Brooks’s BoBos. The fucking New Agers, for fuck’s sake! I see a lot of smug back-patting about stopping a war that they didn’t really stop, but I don’t see a whole lot of lingering influence from those incendiary authors among today’s graying boomers. Didn’t we hear about how the world would be different once they started running things? Yeah, um, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, the two boomer presidents. Stick that in your bong and smoke it.

Where are the Germaine Greers, the Jerry Rubins, the Hunter Thompsons, the Richard Brautigans — those challenging, annoying, offensive, sometimes silly, always polemic authors whom young people used to adore to their parents’ dismay?

He then — unwittingly, apparently — answers his own question.

A new survey of the attitudes of American college students published by the University of California at Los Angeles found that two-thirds of freshmen identify themselves as “middle of the road” or “conservative.”

The hell you say. Kids who grew up listening to their boring old parents, aunts and uncles droning on about Woodstock and Haight-Ashbury found that the best way to rebel was by becoming…conservative? Who’d’a thunk it? Has anyone thought to make a sitcom based on this idea yet?

I do agree with the professor quoted who sees this sort of pedestrian mentality in students as being reflective of growing up during the years of conservative backlash from 1980 onward. Really, why should they care about reading for its own sake? What good is that going to do them in the “real” world? Don’t we all know successful businesspeople who are just plain dumb? And don’t we know intelligent, well-read, creative people who scrape by on minimum-wage jobs because no employer gives a shit about that liberal arts degree? I mean, of course I wish it weren’t so, but this is the logical end result of a Puritan culture that only cares about practical, lucrative results. It’s not today’s students’ fault that they’ve internalized those lessons all too well.

Today’s toddlers and infants, though — those little tykes should be very entertaining in a couple decades.

Browbeating

By in art, books, education, foolosophy, nietzsche

Lowbrow, but I rock a little know-how

— Red Hot Chili Peppers

“Oh, my greed! There is no selflessness in my soul but only an all-coveting self that would like to appropriate many individuals as so many additional pairs of eyes and hands – a self that would like to bring back the whole past, too, and that will not lose anything that it could possibly possess. Oh, my greed is a flame! Oh, that I might be reborn in a hundred beings!” – Whoever does not know this sigh from firsthand experience does not know the passion of the search for knowledge.

— Nietzsche

From Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason:

Middlebrow culture, which began in organized fashion with the early nineteenth century lyceum movement – when no one thought of culture in terms of “brows” – and extended through the fat years of the Book-of-the-Month Club in the 1950s and early 1960s, was at heart a culture of aspiration. Its aim was not so much to vanquish the culture of the gutter, although that was part of the idea, as to offer a portal to something more elevated.

…We did indeed, as (Virginia) Woolf observed disgustedly, have “pictures, or reproductions from pictures, by dead painters” on our walls; my mother’s taste ran to Van Gogh, Renoir, and Degas, I can still see the Degas ballerinas who adorned my bedroom walls, and it would not surprise me if that early exposure to middlebrow reproductions had something to do with a passion for art that did not emerge until my mid-twenties.

…The distinctive feature of American middlebrow culture was its embodiment of the old civic credo that anyone willing to invest time and energy in self-education might better himself. Many uneducated lowbrows, particularly immigrants, cherished middlebrow values: the millions of sets of encyclopedias sold door to door from the twenties through the fifties were often purchased on the installment plan by parents who had never owned a book but were willing to sacrifice to provide their children with information about the world that had been absent from their own upbringing. Remnants of earnest middlebrow striving survive today among various immigrant groups, but the larger edifice of middlebrow culture, which once encompassed Americans of many social classes as well as ethnic and racial backgrounds, has collapsed. The disintegration and denigration of the middlebrow are closely linked to the political and class polarization that distinguishes the current wave of anti-intellectualism from the popular suspicion of highbrows and eggheads that has always, to a greater or lesser degree, been a part of the American psyche. What has been lost is an alternative to mass popular culture, imbibed unconsciously and effortlessly through the audio and video portals that surround us all. What has been lost is the culture of effort.

…I look back on the middlebrow with affection, gratitude and regret rather than condescension not because the Book-of-the-Month club brought works of genius into my life but because the monthly pronouncements of its reviewers were one of the many sources that encouraged me to seek a wider world. In our current infotainment culture, in which every consumer’s opinion is supposed to be as good as any critic’s, it is absurd to imagine that a large commercial entity would attempt to use an objective concept of greatness as a selling point for anything. That people should aspire to read and think about great books, or even aspire to being thought of as the sort of person who reads great books, is not a bad thing for a society.

This is one of those rare, but always welcome, times when I find a swirling mass of inchoate thoughts in my own head suddenly expressed clearly and concisely by another writer.

I was busy entertaining dreams of a career in music in my late teens and early twenties, and despite the urgings of my parents, chose to spend my time and energy focusing on that in lieu of a college education (leaving aside a handful of courses at a community college mainly taken just for fun). Yet I had always been bookish and introspective from childhood, and a genuine interest in ideas for their own sake and a curiosity about the wider world was always part of me. Thus, the type of earnest, autodidactic striving Jacoby describes turned out to be my means of entry into a (more or less) intellectual life.

Serendipitously, it was one of those community college courses, Philosophy 101, that really set my mind on fire and gave me a serious passion for knowledge, and, perhaps more importantly, an inkling that there might actually be answers to the big questions that had always seemed too imposing and forbidding to approach before. Reading along with some of the greatest minds in history as they grappled with those questions, thrilling to each insight gained, seeing entirely new ways of looking at the world open up before my eyes – I’ll never forget how exhilarating that all was.

It was right about that same time that my passion for music was in full bloom as well, and, having been pretty introverted and distant from most of my peers, I was a relatively late arrival on the rock music scene. Having spent most of my childhood and adolescence listening to whatever my parents were listening to – oldies, light jazz, soul and pop – my exposure to rock and heavy metal was no less of a revelatory, earthshaking experience than philosophy would be a couple years later. Again, there was the feeling of being awestruck, just rapturously taking in this entire new universe that had somehow existed outside of my awareness.

Of course, much of that music and lots of those books seem silly to me now, almost two decades later. But, like Jacoby, I’ll always feel grateful and affectionate for them because they pointed the way towards more timeless works. Hearing a rock musician favorably refer to a classical composer or classic author meant more to me than hearing it from the expected authority figures – parents, teachers, etc. I suspect she might be more inclined to lump popular music in with “mass popular culture” than with middlebrow culture, but at any rate, that was the path I took.

I do understand what she means when she complains of the lack of an alternative to that popular culture, though. Personally speaking, I know far too many people who are intelligent enough, as far as that goes, but who nonetheless have zero interest in reading for pleasure, in being exposed to new ways of thinking, in just simply challenging themselves. Work at a meaningless job they hate and vegetate in front of the tv afterward. Gossip and drink. As much as it’s helped keep me from being “successful”, I’m glad I was questioning that way of living before I was even able to grow facial hair.

Ultimately, my own experience has led me to think that art is a two-way street; you can’t really say how a given piece is going to affect a reader or listener due to their own background and preconceptions. I think the border between the browlands is much more porous than people think, and as such, I feel less inclined to condemn and judge anything done from the heart, so to speak, as if all these false prophets are going to lead naive beginners astray if they’re not firmly put in their place.

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