Spitting Into the Wind

Professor J,

"You are wasting your time thinking about the ideas.  Just spit back what they tell you." It is easy to imagine this advice being given to people living under totalitarian regimes or trying to survive as prisoners of war. I wonder how many students might tell us that that is indeed how they feel about their schooling much of the time.  This has become the theme of our modern education system. Who has time (or increasingly, the inclination) to think about ideas? Especially big ones. We have, as a society, allowed our children to become slaves to grade point averages and acceptance letters. What kind of culture tells its young people that they are wasting their time thinking about ideas? Shouldn't one of the main priorities of civilized adults be to get the young people that they can influence, to think, and to ask questions? But add to the current trend overworked distracted parents who may fear losing their own jobs to outsourcing or outright elimination, and they are likely to encourage their high school and college aged children to steer clear of classes they may be passionate about. A young person may have to fight an uphill battle on several fronts to get the education he really wants and be true to himself. An artist? A philosopher? An anthropologist? Just as you say, Professor, everyone wants to know how those things translate into making a living.

"The flight from the humanities has become a flight from conscience."  How convenient. Those disciplines that cause us to ask hard questions of ourselves about what we think and believe and why, are being pushed aside at a time when we need very much to be asking just those things. We need to be grappling with the law and thinking about whose interests it most often serves, or where the proper balance between individual liberty and communal responsibility is.  We need to be imagining if past mistakes by other people in other times similar to ours might have had different outcomes had they taken a different course. (Can we learn from them and avert disaster?)We need to be encouraging people to embrace their passions outside the little boxes the current system wants to force them into, Procrustes style. We need to be able to ask what our moral obligation is to our neighbors and communities. We need to ask what kind of world is it that we want to live in and leave behind? We need to think BIG, but super focused specialties and small mindedness are the winning the battle. The lack of vision we are perishing from, is a big bold one. One with a conscience. It seems more that people aren't so much fleeing the humanities, as being DRIVEN from them by those in charge.

"Our elites--the ones in Congress, the ones on Wall Street, and the ones being produced at prestigious universities and business schools--do not have the capacity to fix our financial mess. Indeed, they will make it worse. They have no concept, thanks to the educations they have received, of how to replace a failed system with a new one."  (p.111) So the multiple paradigm shifts that we are in need of are not going to come from the top down. Those who hold positions with real power not only are not interested in creating substantial change, but because of how they've been educated, may be incapable of envisioning the real solutions that need to take place.  It isn't going to happen. They are, for all their lofty speeches and feigned intellectual curiosity, incompetent. The things that are necessary at this point are beyond them and they have no desire to rock the yachts they are so comfortably riding in.  Change is going to come from the bottom. To quote Christopher Gardner, “The cavalry ain't coming. You have to do it yourself.”

"The single most important quality needed to resist evil is moral autonomy. As Immanuel Kant wrote, moral autonomy is possible only through reflection, self-determination, and the courage not to cooperate." (p.112)  Good for the TEA Party protesters and the Occupy Wall Streeters. But we can also individually refuse to cooperate. When we stop buying what they are selling, whether it is a well marketed substitute for an education or the next "must have" product or event that is being sold with hyped up frenzy inducing advertising, change will happen.  You cannot have massive collective change without masses of individuals who are willing to ask the tough questions and face the equally tough answers. It isn't enough just to ask them of those in charge (Hedges has shown us why that is likely a losing battle). We have to start asking them of ourselves. Only then can we hold anyone else accountable.
 
Hedges makes it clear that we have got to stop expecting anything more of the elites than what we've been getting: "Obama is a product of this elitist system. So are his degree-laden cabinet members They come out of Harvard, Yale, Wellesley, and Princeton. Their friends and classmates made huge fortunes on Wall Street and in powerful law firms. They go to the same class reunions. They belong to the same clubs. They speak the same easy language of privilege, comfort, and entitlement. The education they have obtained has served to rigidify and perpetuate social stratification. These elite schools prevent, to use Arnold's words, the 'best selves' in the various strata in our culture from communicating across class lines." (p. 113) The average American may not be able to pinpoint the problem or articulate it as well as the author but the nationwide disgust and anger is due to the fact that people know that for the most part, there isn't any real choice come election time. These people in power, with the names of ivy league universities on their resumes, who look more and more like they don't have any real answers, only fuel the anti-intellectual sentiment among the populace.

"The socially important knowledge and cultural ideas embodied in history, literature, philosophy, and religion, which are at their core subversive and threatening to authority, have been banished from public discourse."  Is it any wonder? They can't have too many Neos unplugging at one time...