As a generation, surely we have had things better than almost any before us
Last weekend I watched a graduate student, a very smart grad who does all that her advisers ask, dismiss history and empiricism as social constructions before arriving at a point in which her argument required that she distinguish a real world.
She paused.
She giggled.
And then she said “real world” with air quotes. From the podium.
I laughed to myself at the time, but then I couldn’t stop thinking about this. I mean, she couldn’t admit to the realness of anything. That’s a hard path to walk, a difficult life, to say the least. You have to divorce your scientific “there is no reality” self from your emotive, experiential self at all times. And worse, you can’t communicate. Because you’ve complicated the hell outta these symbols that are only really about communicating shared understandings anyhow. You know what I mean, right? Words? Signifiers we fit with signifieds? Until someone says, “There is no truth.”
Not to sound like a functionalist, but… I think such an existence is dysfunctional.
Now, wed to the above, my experiences with 22 year olds about to complete their BFAs. I’ve taught since I was 25, am currently 36. My students can’t even hypothesize the utopic. I adore them, I wish them the best, but… it’s hard to aspire when there are no realities, don’t you think? Or maybe you don’t. But they seem to.
And if 22 year olds investing tens of thousands of dollars per year in arts educations are overwhelmed and thus hopeless, I really do think we might be fucked in general. These are the haves, dude. Though I admit, also, that this is when Paul Tough’s whole “grit” idea becomes sexy (ie kids with tough childhoods become resilient adults, so that they, and not the rich kids, will grow to be our next innovators and leaders).
But then I turn my brain back on and remember that Tough is mostly just hugely problematic; his is a brilliant and vile defense of the benefits of racism and classism–I won’t take you here now. Instead, let’s remember that all the radical rock happening in the UK in the 60s and 70s was funded by the dole. And we’re dole-less now.
Wait, wait. We’re all over the place, aren’t we? Will you come back?
You say, “As a generation, surely we have had things better than almost any before us? The ‘ideology’ you deplore has provided a relatively stable and prosperous society, and however lopsided it may be, information is so accessible.”
This–see my title–is what I wanted to address initially. “Better” is hard to quantify. You have more information, yes, but you have that in a moment when formal education is 1) as a result of that info and its accessibility, grossly out of date yet 2) still our primary means of distributing cultural capital.
Young tech millionaires aside, I assume that’s frustrating as hell.
We are each culturally bound to our increasingly shitty educational system. And so we consume degrees, not knowledge sets. But do you know that I can get you a PhD in astrophysics on the street in Mexico City? Framed for ten bucks. I wish more people knew that. Maybe not the astrophysicists, but the MBA’s for sure. Cuz those are ten bucks, too.
You could pocket the difference. Get on with life. I want radical education transformation, and that starts with the defetishization of our present system of higher ed. Second best: I want a firm commitment from the masses not to pay our student loans back. This, like Tough, I’ll explain on some other day.
The numbers are brutal, dear. You have higher poverty rates now than in the 1980’s. You have more child malnutrition (25% of kids in the US are “food insecure”; this means they risk death from curable illness and infection as well as growth stunting) now than in the 1980’s. And I am not looking back fondly at the 80’s. I am just saying that now is riddled with paradoxes that I find frustrating, and I say so with deep knowledge of the historical and political-economic contexts of those paradoxes. Seeing the paradoxes without understanding them; yeah, I would shut down, too.
Finally, I do not think stable and lopsided co-exist. We’re not talking of ink prints and symmetry, we’re talking about a radically unequal distribution of wealth in a system defined by capital’s ability to beget capital (really man’s ability to use capital to beget capital, but that sounds less cool).
Marx predicted revolution 170 years ago because of the lopsidedness he foresaw. Which brings us to ideology. And maybe here is where we most radically depart in our thinking.
Neoliberalism has not brought prosperity in anything except for discourse. And it’s hard to eat discourse. I do, in this particular case, have all empirical evidence on my side, but… in a world where there are no realities, that doesn’t add up to much. Infinite points: ideology.
Perhaps I am merely reiterating the frustrations with which you have already disagreed? I do have newfound hope. It is that the gamers, via VR, test new world systems that are unlike anything we have ever known, that they play through these, find institutional orders that are sustainable, and then lead movements to implement these in the “real world” (air quotes). Yes, really.
