Author: J. Mohorcich
Hi, Oxy! I have a thought experiment for you. Imagine a supernatural being came to you and, by way of a meandering Platonic dialogue, brought you around to the idea that in order to continue studying certain societal ills you’d have to contribute to them. What?, you would say, and the being would readjust its lorgnette and clarify: In order to understand capital-E Evil (e.g., to secure the privilege of reading about Evil in dusty, pleonastic, beaten-to-death academic detail and reproducing these thoughts in your own squishy, youthful prose = learning), you have to aid, abet, perpetuate, reify, realize this evil. Bummer, right? Horseshit, right?
And but okay so here’s the thing: We, as thinking-acting-being students of liberal arts, must reconcile some things immanent to our existence. In ugly, fluorescent, superliminal terms: We spend thick chunks of our lives furrowing brows over serious, purulent, capital-P Problems: capital punishment, affordable and sanitary housing, sustainable ways of eating and traveling and living, human trafficking, incarceration and recidivism, intravenous-drug use, deforestation, the way in which late capitalism siphons away the more beautiful and fragile parts of the human soul, et cet., et cet., et cet. This is our pantheon of Evils: We come to know it, we offer up paper and ink anent its phylogeny, its analysis, its symptoms and its anatomy. It’s a powerful and intractable canon if ever there was one in Western thought. It helps shape who we are: We point at it and say, I Am Not That! Seriously, You Guys! That Stuff Is Super Fucked-Up!
Here’s the other thing we all know at some level, though: If we were to compose a list of the things a young, intelligent, clear-eyed and capable American student could do with her or his life to Fight Evil and order that list in descending order from Mercury, reading Nabokov or Judith Butler or Catullus in the Green Bean would scarcely be sunwise of Neptune.
Yeah: $180,000 worth of mosquito nets is a lot of frustrated, malarial African mosquitos. More importantly, the incalculable impact of the egress of one more shit-giving human being out of her/his ephebic, shimmery soap-bubble and into the World (that’s you! you give a shit!): This would be nice. In terms of efficacy, these things would probably beat afternoons of Woolf and tofurkey. But wait! Isn’t being an Educated Human Being the first and most important step re Fighting Evil?Okay, but here’s the thing: These categories and their implicit wink-winks and nudge-nudges (i.e., if college graduates are Educated Human Beings, what does that say, implicitly and with a fair degree of the polished sanctimony we’re all so good at, about the potential for efficacy among people who never got to crack a book amid 80 percent post-consumer-content coffee-lids?) are basically – and we all know this – a syncretic gloss, a glittery and smooth sheen with which we unite the fact that (a) we believe we know, intimately and intuitively, what Evil looks like and (b) we spend most of our time, um, doing things that pretty much totally ignore (a).Is the point we’re all sharp-tongued but soft-toothed hypocrites, that sundry mentoring programs and UEP’s sustainable garden and Oxy Dems’ door-knocking and all those protests we carpool to city hall to attend are hollow, saccharine palliatives for souls wrenched by serious internal contradiction? Hopefully not. Should we all quit college and join Greenpeace? No, God no. Actually, I have like no fucking idea. But here’s the thing: It doesn’t hurt to move past syncretism and caress the bounds and crevasses of how we live. Well, it might, a bit.
What I’m suggesting is that we all, more or less, share a certain low-level and tacit acceptance of the trade-off between studying these things and confronting these things. And I don’t necessarily know where that balance is best-struck, if at all. But I think it’s incumbent upon us, as thinking machines and social beings, to think very, very hard about its existence and its mechanisms.
We are, in direct terms, privileged human beings whose privilege is manifest in critiquing privilege. It’s a very fucked-up, very confused-feeling thing to be.
I don’t know. It’s kind of shitty. Good thing it’s only a thought experiment, right?
J. Mohor?ich is a senior Politics major. He can be reached at jmohorcich@oxy.edu.
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