I’ve just graduated college and I’m at the apartment of a fellow alumna. Her friend group is there, too. They are much cooler than I am. They host boozy brunches, are skilled vintage shoppers, celebrate Galentine's day and have apartments that are festooned with twinkle lights. I want in. I feel like I’ve almost made it.
But then the conversation turns to the oppression of marginalized people and social injustice in general and I say something unforgivable: “I don’t know… I just feel like America might be kind of fundamentally fair.”
Jaws drop. I backpeddled quickly: I’m not suggesting that the historical disenfranchisement of women and Black people was fair. I’m not saying slavery was fair. Or the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. I’m just saying that, today, you can kind of do whatever you want in America. People might not want to help you, you might have the same resources as other people, but for a large number of people, no one can stop you from doing basically anything you want to do. In America, most people are free to act upon the world in whatever way they see fit. Underneath the layers of so-called structural inequality there is on a foundational level a somewhat level playing field. Isn’t there?
Reader, they did not invite me back.
To be honest I should have known better. By that point I had been steeped in four years of social justice education. I knew exactly how they saw the world. It was how I saw the world too. Most of the time.
That night, in my attic apartment on the corner of 29th and Jefferson, I wallowed in a feeling of rejection, humiliation and un-belonging. But looking out my dormer window at the Seattle skyline and the Olympic Mountains beyond, I couldn’t help but think: something seems off.
It was a year or so into Obama’s second term. We were winning. Our side—and by that I mean the progressive left—was winning. Why weren’t we happier about it? Why did it feel as if my Jesuit university’s vision of a more just and humane world was slipping further and further away? Why did it seem hopeless?
Perhaps it has something to do with this: a few years earlier, as a junior, I wrote a short essay titled, “God is Dead, the Author is Dead, I Might as Well be Dead.” In it I recount attending an honors plenary session on the topic of distributive justice. The event focused on Marxist vs. Libertarian perspectives, but I had no trouble connecting these esoteric themes directly to my own life.
I wrote in my essay, “there is no escaping that onerous privilege which makes the very existence of the western, mostly Caucasian, middle-class immoral.” It was a morally untenable situation, according to twenty-one-year-old me and I concluded, “we are born into distributive injustice, raised in distributive injustice, and grow to perpetuate distributive injustice. When taken to its logical extreme, the theoretical solution is suicide.”
This cannot be what my Catholic university intended to teach me.
Fortunately not everything I learned as an undergraduate portended such dire conclusions. Latin classes, in particular, were a delight, and could be relied upon to mostly steer clear of questions of social justice. Indeed, Dr. Madsen, the venerated Latin professor, was exceedingly problematic himself, but I wrote about his classes with obvious adoration:
He is the steward of what little is left of the old values, the antiquated (pun intended) traditions. He was, after all, the last student to graduate from this academy with a degree in classics; they dissolved the major upon his matriculation due to lack of interest. He is tenacious in his refusal to bow to the irrelevancy of his subject, his department, and even this institution. When all the world seems to say that these tomes–the literature, the philosophy, the archeology, the language–have been mined already, that they are nothing but carcasses and of no import to the modern world, Dr. M. declares them the most important things of all, testaments to the origins of the Western World. “This is history,” he tells us as we read Polybius’ uncanny prediction of Rome’s fall, “and history has nothing to teach us,” he finishes sarcastically.
Dr. Madsen. was not the only professor who offered a more traditional mode of education. There was Father Duffy who made us read Ulysses and all of Seamus Heaney. And Father Leigh who is the reason I can recite Ozymandius, Hyla Brook, The World Is Too Much With Us, and parts of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by heart. Dr. Gitre’s courses on the Arab Spring and the Modern Middle East were unmissable. And translating a Medieval gynecology text from the original latin with Dr. Earenfight was a thrilling if frustrating experience (medieval Latin is no joke).
But what I wrote about Mr. Madsen—“he has not said what it is that we should do with the troves of information we have inherited from him”— applied to all of these other venerable professors as well. And I was frustrated, in particular, with Dr. Madsen “for not articulating to us how we might better the world armed only with first year Latin and a basic understanding of Roman history.”
It’s ironic considering that I felt so unguided as to what I should do with my education. Afterall, Jesuits pride themselves on preaching a faith that does work in the world. “Go forth and set the world on fire,” St. Ignatius of Loyola (the founder of the Jesuit order) said. Jesuit education is meant to train students for action. At my school that meant social justice. Kolvenbach House, a sort of mini dorm where only the most do-gooder-est students were allowed to live, was the most coveted prize on campus. The most accomplished, civic-minded, do-gooders were part of an informal strata, known among school administrators as “The Golden 200.” And a non-trivial number of students, many of my friends included, headed straight for Africa upon graduation, hell-bent on delivering a more just and humane world.
Part of the reason for this do-gooder-ism, beyond the Jesuit predilection for action, was something called “liberation theology.” This is a leftist version of Catholicism, espoused by many Jesuits, that asserts what is known as a “preferential option for the poor.” Essentially God loves poor people a little bit more than everyone else and wants all of the non-poor people to emulate him by devoting themselves to the wellbeing of the poor.
This, then, was what I was meant to do with my education: liberate the poor. The only problem was all my poststructuralist historiography classes had taught me that language, history, literature, art, music, even time itself was imbued with the logic of capitalistic oppression. After all, “the master's tool will never dismantle the master's house,” and language itself was a tool of the master. And language being so fundamental to, well, everything… well you can see how difficult doing anything might become.
The other problem, and this does not reflect well on me: I wasn’t very interested in liberating the poor. Leaving aside the poststructuralist concerns, I didn’t see any poverty alleviation programs that seemed particularly effective or, you know, scalable, to me at the time. I had already concluded that recycling was a hoax (a fact that appalled my roommate), and, frankly, most poverty alleviation programs seemed not much better.
But despite my suspicion of poverty alleviation programs, and my provocative assertion that America might be a fair-ish place after all, I in no way rejected the fundamental logic of the social justice oriented progressive left.
To wit, here is me agonizing about the decision to buy an iPhone:
I so want to believe that we are still on the beaten path, that this was part of the plan, that we are moving towards what was always intended for us. If those things were true, if we were not as lost as we know ourselves to be, then I would feel no qualms about my participation. By which I mean simply, that going to a local shop and buying a new piece of equipment wouldn’t be anxiety provoking because I would not worry about the “conflict minerals” or the sweatshop labor that went into creating that device, and I would not worry that that same device would steal my humanity and my ability to relate in a deeply personal and connected way.
Astonishingly, an anonymous commentator replied to this somewhat overwrought elegy. They wrote:
I think you look at technology all wrong–as if an advance in technology “brings us away from the world” in some negative way. As if an understanding of how the resources of our universe can change life as we know it overnight is a bad thing for humanity.
That cell phone you speak of. It works because humans figured out what an electromagnetic wave was. Because we were able to investigate enough into the “what” and “why” of our world to figure out that these “waves” exist. Then we went further and learned how to encode these waves with information. It is an astounding feat philosophically, scientifically, and practically.
I did not respond to this comment at the time, nor do I think I took it very seriously. Now I wonder how I missed the important message this person was attempting to share with me. Now I wonder why this message wasn’t a part of my education at all.
There are many ways to write a story. This is the fundamental insight of historiography. According to the Annales School, history should be written in terms of the long durée, on a scale of 10,000 years and with a focus on geography. Feminist historians want it written in terms of patriarchy and gender. Howard Zinn wants it written from the perspective of the oppressed. Marxist historians, unsurprisingly, want to focus on social class and economic realities. Biographers are interested in the deeds of individual people.
While I learned about many of these schools of thought in my historiography class, it’s ironic that an anonymous commenter on my blog seemed to have a better grasp of this concept than I did. They wrote:
Your iPhone can be:
a) The perfect example of human decadence
b) A dehumanizing object that turns you into a machine as well
c) A wasteful use of precious resources
d) Something that does have beauty, something that is the product of the mind and the mind alone. Something that exists because we figured out so much about our natural world that we can send messages thousands of miles, at 3.0 x 10^8 m/s (0.3 gigameters per second), invisible to the naked eye, and connect to someone in New England from Washington in a time that we consider “instant”.
An excavation of the many failures and ailments of higher education is beyond the scope of this piece, but I will say this: A local friend of mine wrote in a essay for Harpers recently about his “feelings of isolation and disenchantment as a result of teaching university students, whose sadness and despair is so rampant that, on my evening commute, I often find myself in tears. Audibly, I wonder if we, as a culture, are doing enough to furnish them with meaningful systems of belief.”
I would venture to say, based on my own experience, that we are not.
Still I would not give up mornings in Admin 210, parsing Cicero with Dr. Madsen. It was intrinsically rewarding. My mother likes to say that education is the best we have to offer youth, however partial and incomplete that may be. I have no doubt that I received the very best my teachers and my university had to offer.
In the end good teaching may have less to do with imparting beliefs and more to do with relationships. What happens when a master takes the time to share their craft with a novice? Something beautiful. Every time.
My writing from my undergraduate days evinces a great deal of moral and epistemological confusion. And that confusion was a source of anxiety and distress. But then, I also wrote this:
Even were I to know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that these texts, and these histories were doomed to fall into obscurity and irrelevance, I would still arrive as promptly as possible at 9:00 am every morning in Admin 210, to parse with Dr. M. I would sit by the radiator beneath the bay window’s divided lights, and try my hand, unprepared though it may be, at yet another pedantic and indignant gem from Cicero. And I would know by some unseen, indefinable method of knowing (call in the epistemologists!) that it was wholesome and that it was good.
Nominative, singular spes spei feminine, and the third person, singular, present, indicative, active of sum esse fui futurum: Spes est.,“There is hope.””
Thank you to Julius Simonelli for asking to read something I’d written and for sharing such thoughtful feedback.