Fuck Fencesitters
Since beginning the course, I believe I have grown more indignant but with a lacing of tragic hope. I think firstly my historical perspective on the human event lead to this. When reading texts as far back as Galileo and Sumner, the same prevailing vices lead men as today. Consistently, ignorance, rationalized and moralized into some warped justification for statists, spearheaded the crucifixion of Galileo for positing that the Earth was not the center of the universe. Just so, centuries later the same reaction would force John Griffin to take his family and leave his hometown after revealing the hellishness of black life to white society.
However, these vanguard voices won out in the end, as society grew more amiable towards scientific skepticism and racial inequality. That’s because militant ignorance doesn’t define the human event even if it is one of its most powerful components. Rather, those who survive the worst humans are capable of and can aptly discuss these atrocities — Douglass, Frankl, Griffin — find lasting power greater than their opponents, power that echoes in history books and legislatures. Integrity and a strong constitution in the face of evil can precipitate social change in the right conditions. Drawing from this tragic hope, I have gained a lens to perceive my interpersonal relationships and society through. Though things may appear to only be worsening and all solutions disappearing, those who fought under good intentions and with clearly articulated rhetoric have succeeded against what oppressed them.
Still, unbridled capitalism at times seems an invincible foe. From Sumner to Affluenza, the deification of property and those who own the most of it has only spread and deepened. American culture revolves around wonton waste and yet it is this cultural touchstone that threatens to render inhospitable the Earth in the times of our grandchildren. The stakes have been raised to global extinction of all life, not through pushing a red button or aliens but because we could not stop growing. It has been hundreds of years since Weber and Marx and Durkheim decried the folly of rampant materialism and unbridled capitalism without even considering its ecological impact, and yet deregulation has shifted American capitalism into its highest gear. Popular culture and Postman recognize how our embrace of science since Galileo has culminated in communication technologies that distance rather than integrate us, dull rather than enrich, and in America at least these voices increasingly find audiences. Reckoning feels ever nearer. Confronted at last with inescapable punishment for our vices, humans have begun to try to curb our worst. Undeniably fluid, the human event, now veering at speeds fueled by advanced communication technology and unprecedented access to historical texts, at last has the inertia to clamp down on this elder foe of materialism.
After all the human event has mostly occurred at low speed and low density. Though what persists is a striving to care for the community, to venture up Mount Olympus and bring back fire. Even if unbridled capitalism has divided communities and fostered abject poverty, that primacy of community has remained. The way some define their community and care have lead to issues in the past, but we humans are getting closer to something that works. And I believe that in my lifetime we will see the former defining aspects of the human event — militant ignorance and unbridled materialism — come under the yoke of broad, equitable community. Yet another American citizen might not be imbued with this hope, I believe because we are not taught to perceive learning as hierarchical and observe the fluid shifting of the human event as long arcs through history.
Besides Durkheim, I believe this one line by Postman may have affected me most, that our high-bandwidth communication society conspires to prevent its citizens from learning and synthesizing broad topics; prevent the citizenry from judging the human event as a growing, morphing reality. In my STEM classes, I find my classmates have often cultivated this disdain for literature and history and are possessed by a profound political apathy. Some among them reason they should they just stay in their lane and work their job for a few decades, they can avoid the troubles of political life and live a fulfilled. But that is not what the human event demands of us. A full human exists in a state of tension, concerns their self with the issues of the community and works to solve them. Remaining moderate and apathetic serves only to submit to something lower than materialists or the militant ignorant. Dante deigned these fences-sitters be damned to the first ring of hell, but I believe for their complicit carelessness they deserve lower. Thus, it is the duty of any individual who understands the responsibilities of the human event to proselytize to these inactive moderates.
I believe that that call to preach responsibility will endure within me longest of all from studying the human event. Indeed, militant ignorance and unbridled materialism seem to be on the outs and so I am imbued with a renewed hope in the human spirit and our ecological and spiritual course in the next centuries. I now believe we are all imbued with a natural constitution that insists on a renewed focus on community and that the way to ensure this is to preach the virtue of action.
