This is a rehash of my ideas on alienation and belief that I took out of a larger essay on Czeslaw Milosz, which I will publish soon. I believe in repeating myself, because people will eventually come around to taking me seriously if I repeat myself enough. However, after 30 years of trying, I have had no luck yet. Being a perennial optimist, I’ll continue to keep trying until I get it right.
The Touchstone of Alienation in Plato’s Cave
I had dropped out of college in 1981 because I had been reading books like D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love and was being told by my professors that books like these hold the key to life. But I had found an impenetrable metaphor at the heart of literary works. I dropped out of college because I naively thought that my teachers at Ripon were simply naïve. I went to work reading Joseph Campbell, who held answers to the urgent questions that I had about the connection between the metaphor and reality.
My thinking about Joseph Campbell led me very quickly to his belief that the “truth” could be found by shifting away from true belief into the “Word Behind Words.” But I had questions. How would I know when I had arrived there? What if the word behind words was just an illusion? Wouldn’t I be giving up my solid beliefs for chimera? This led me to posing the question differently while I was out of school than the same questions were being asked within the academic grove. Not being able to solve the question, I went back to school after four years of working. While I was an undergraduate, I had no problems at all. I was a star student. But when I got to graduate school, I was alienated from this generally-accepted point of view for the simple reason that I could not agree with my academic colleagues that their shift from individual reality to a more prefect reality was indeed tenable.
I had found a flaw in Joseph Campbell’s system of thought. He was telling his readers that they must give up their beliefs in order to embrace all beliefs; for it was there that the mind had expressed itself most fully. This sense of alienation from one’s childhood beliefs becomes the first and necessary step on the way out of ignorance of the Platonic Cave and into the sun-like bliss of true knowledge. Once again, those who actually believe what religion is telling them to do are fools, while those who embrace a new and thoroughly metaphorical religiosity are closer to ‘the truth.’ But I was searching after some way into the metaphor of reality to make it real in fact, and could not be satisfied with my teachers’ profession of faith in themselves that could after all be wrong, as it relied on belief in a metaphor to keep things stable. What was the difference between Campbell’s metaphor that people were invited to belief in (but not too much that they excluded the beliefs of others) and true belief, I asked myself?
I had other problems with the prescribed academic regimen. While I was out of school, I worked in a bank, and there I met people who were not intellectuals like I aspired to be butwho appeared to be rich and happy. Such people, Milosz was assuring me in his work The Captive Mind
I was committed to learning ‘the truth,’ but I could not get past the bridge of metaphor that stood in the way of my mind’s engagement with reality on my own terms. Believing (naively, it turned out) that someone in academia knew what I did not about how to bridge the gap between my mind and Campbell’s ‘word behind words,’ I went back to college, figuring that someone could answer questions that I could not.
Alienation in College
I was quite happy in my undergraduate experience, but my experience in grad school was extremely difficult. I was made the scapegoat on the first day of class, when I told the teachers in the required class on How to Teach Writing that I was planning on teaching outlining in my writing class. My teacher told me that that was the way Nazis taught. This made no sense to me. I put it down to the small mind of my teacher, who was teaching at an insignificant Midwestern university.
Not being one to back down in the face of threats, I pushed forward. On the day I was being observed for the first time, I dared to teach a single day’s worth of grammar on the use of a semicolon. I thought I was making my initial position clearer to a teacher who had not understood my original point on the first day of class and didn’t actually think it was that bid a deal. I was wrong. After class, I met with my teacher who screamed (I am not exaggerating; I wish I was) that she could not understand why I continued in my obstinacy, that she “could not understand what [I was] doing,” and her repeated allegations that I was a Nazi. given in increasingly elevated and shrill tones. I thought I was teaching nothing more than how to use a semicolon. (Maybe I’ll write up my lecture for you to review soon).
This was an important moment in my intellectual development, because it forever closed the door on my being comfortable with the Left’s approach to intellectual things. I took the position that I had gone to a substandard university and that when I got to a better university that I would be able to make myself understood. But, as it turned out, things were worse at the University of Illinios. Though I was able to negotiate through the politically-correct atmosphere of the university, I was forever confined to the outsider-looking-in status. That was not a position I was comfortable with. I always had pursued academia on account of role models like Cary Grant’s incompetent but brilliant paleontologist in Bringing Up Baby, the incompetent but brilliant scholars of Ball of Fire, and Fred MacMurray’s absent-minded professor in The Absent-Minded Professor. I thought that I, too, was smart but did not fit in to any social community, and I was looking to fit in in a community of misfits like me. When they rejected me, I dropped out of my search for an academic position, although I maintain few hard feelings over my treatment in academia.
This was not always the case. As I have told you before, after the initial rise of talk radio, I was briefly enamored with conservative positions on the issue of political correctness until I realized that conservatives had a lot of complaints about the problem of political correctness but no solutions except that they be included in the academic conversation. But they were not willing to do the work of working out a new solution to the problem of politics. The most telling case of this came when Stanley Fish was arguing with Dinesh D’Souza on the merits of Jacques Derrida’s work. Fish asked D’Sousa if he had even read Derrida, to which D’Sousa replied “No.” That was the moment when I was forever done with conservatism as a forward-looking movement. He should have better prepared. Instead, he was simply looking for the too-easy answers that had been given to literary problems in an earlier generation. Fish, on the other hand, could have been a little more accepting of complaints about the lack of internal consistency in his thought that D’Sousa had located. By putting D’Sousa off to a very difficult author, Derrida, he had also deferred answering the quite reasonable question put to him by his opponent. What were the ‘words behind the words’ that Fish was pointing to?
Divisions Arising
In my thought, we could do better than Fish’s deferral of methodological questions that only put conservatives on the defensive. As intellectuals, we need to answer all questions directly, or admit that we don’t know the answers. In my opinion, Fish is attempting to answer questions at the same time admitting that he doesn’t have answers of his own. Instead of facing the limitations of his own thought, Fish is dismissing D’Sousa as not worthy of consideration because his opponent has not read the documents that he (as an insider academic) has deemed important. He is able to set the ground rules on which the battle will be won. When the conservatives wouldn’t play, academics dismissed conservatives as conservatives had dismissed academics.
This, in my opinion, has led to a division in this country between two positions on the location of the “truth” without any sort of system for sorting out truth from falsehood. When Rush Limbaugh proclaims that he is telling the “truth,” he must dismiss those who oppose him as “liars.” The same thing is true of Al Franken, who professed to be telling people “the truth
Good and Evil in the Land of Plenty
Morality is one of those things that people use to exclude others from their own firmly-held circles. This holds true in high school cliques as well as the ‘highest’ circles of philosophy. This sort of moralizing behavior leads people to do two things. First, they are confirmed in their belief that their beliefs are the only beliefs. The second follows from the first: having such conviction in their beliefs upheld, “others” must be convinced, or they will be excluded from discussion and quite possibly from humanity itself. There is no room for compromise in such a universe: only tests of belief.
I find this to be true of political commentators on both sides of the aisle. On the left, Paul Krugman, whose columns I regularly read, believes that his way has been stifled, not by any flaws in his own reasoning, but by the right’s systematic opposition to spending more money to fix the economy. If only the right would get out of the way, then Paul could have his perfect dream realized. And who are we, who don’t have a Nobel Prix to argue with someone who has on? His contempt for my centrist beliefs doesn’t make me dismiss him from the universe of possible beliefs, but it does make me question his own assumption that he has all the answers he thinks he does.
The same phenomenon affects the right. Rush Limbaugh believes that moderates are fools who won’t commit. Jonah Goldberg doesn’t trust people like me who are seeking a different way (see this video where I believe he makes the case for dismissing those who lack ideological purity; I must confess that I have not watched the video to make sure my stroke-addled mind is remembering where he said this; I am no more than “mostly-sure”). Ann Coulter, one of my favorite columnists on account of her acute and biting humor, believes that independent people like me are fools who won’t commit to her perfectly-reasonable-and not-in-any-way offensive positions. I may always agree with her, but it is hard to dismiss her without running the risk of appearing monumentally stupid. For some reason, the committed liberals who populate the new media have no problem doing this. This results in the loss of their status as holders of both sides in a ‘fair and balanced’ position.
In such a universe of commitment based on a priori positions made before a person picks up a newspaper columnist and reads what the columnist has to say, decisions about what to watch or read in a universe of 500 cable television channels and the infinite sources of Google News are now made on the basis of our assumptions about what we want the world to be, and not on the sometimes unbearably difficult resistance of the world to our ideologically-purified positions that only hold up as long as there is an enemy in place to stand as scapegoat for that which our ideology cannot comprehend. Not that there is a lot of room for me, but I would make a different case.
My Approach
My approach, which I plan on publishing in my forthcoming novel Art in the Age of Talk Radio, is more radical than either liberals or conservatives can imagine. This ought to continue my record of being misunderstood by both liberals on the Left as being firmly on the Right (on account of my ‘irresponsible’ sympathy for money as the primary motivator of human behavior) and by conservatives on the Right as being too liberal (on account of my ‘irresponsible’ libertarianism on social issues).
As I said in a previous post, I managed to avoid the political pressures placed upon me to conform by agreeing to be tutored in department-authorized political posturing—no one was actually interested tutoring me; they just wanted to make sure I wasn’t teaching outside the proscribed limits—and I managed to get through my academic life relatively unscathed. I went through graduate school alienated from both parties, pursuing my own a-political agenda. But, since I was looking to be included in the community of Ball of Fire outsiders, I didn’t relish the prospect of standing to one side as a lone prophetic voice crying for justice in the wilderness.
Because of this, I was for a long time one of those people who could not be satisfied with the (I thought man-made) boundaries erected by academics as a way of justifying their existence in a world apart from the ordinary world of money and monetary value. While is was in graduate school, this made me part of the ‘other.’ I was one of ‘them,’ and no one had to listen to me (and believe me, they didn’t). They already knew that their position was secure. Thus, their only obligation was to lecture me into the ‘truth’ and to wait for its power to dawn on me. When I wouldn’t instantly agree with their positions, I was tagged as a problem. When I fought back, I was tagged as an enemy who must be defeated. There was never any sense that anything I had to say was worth listening to, as only harm could come from listening to a different point of view. It was best to stay away from me.
This was not true of all my teachers, though it was true of 98% my fellow students. My advisers could operate in a world in which I was trying to do something new, even if I could not explain myself perfectly yet. But I had to travel outside of my protected academic enclave at the University of Illinois to make myself heard, because I literally could not get a hearing (fair or otherwise) within the ivy-covered walls of the UIUC English building. They were consumed by the fact that Michael Bérubé was on the cutting edge of societal evolution, and they posted an article of his published in the Village Voice, ‘the definitive source of information for news, music, movies, restaurants, reviews, and events in New York.’ (far away from the rural community of Illinois, from which Bérubé eventually fled) on the wall for all to see. He has prospered in ways that I have not. He is currently the First Vice President of the Modern Language Association and is scheduled to become President in 2012 (see the opening paragraph of ‘Party business’).
I personally like Bérubé, and I said so when I wrote him a letter when I first started my blog. I told him that he gave me some of the best advise I ever received about how to proceed if I couldn’t get a job in the loathsome environment of the academic environment of the 1990s. I will be forever grateful to him. Nevertheless, I could not get behind his intellectual configuration of the universe that was posted on the wall for all to see and follow. In my Art in the Age of Talk Radio, I will give my answer to Bérubé’s from the position of perpetual outsider to his position as perpetual insider. I will send him a copy, as well.
Differences in Personal Lanscapes
Unlike Bérubé, I dropped out of the search for professorial work after it became apparent to me that, however much progress I had made outside the walls of academe, inside I was going to be a perpetual outsider. So I gave up my academic dreams and went to work, where I encountered a new wrinkle in the intellectual landscape: the Pareto Principle. After I had a stroke, I went to work digesting all the implications, both good and bad, of the idea that nature is not just at all but is wildly unfair in its distribution of its gifts.
This includes the gift of a life in academia, which I so much wanted but which I realized was out of my reach, particularly after Michael Bérubé appearance in the 1998 in an article titled ‘Frumpy or Chic? Tweed or Kente? Sometimes Clothes Make the Professor‘ in the Chronicle of Higher Education in a bright (I mean BRIGHT) blue jacket, confirming that I had been naive to believe that the ‘frumpiness’ of Gary Cooper’s academic colleagues and that I had sought out in academia was hopelessly out of fashion. The beauty of the beautiful people was in. I don’t hold grudge, but the life of a perpetual outsider was not for me.
Anyway, that’s off the point. The Pareto Principle, which I learned about outside of academia, seemed to hold the source of a radically new way of looking at nature where both Rush Limbaugh on the right and Joni Mitchell on the left have placed their foundational beliefs. My argument with both of them, and with the more intellectual Czeslaw Milosz
That is the basis of the argument that I have bben attempting to make among my friends, and which I will continue to make in my Art in the Age of Talk Radio. Wish me luck.