I just posted this on a friend of mine’s blog in response to his defense of the Occupy Wall Street movement. While I agree with him and the Occupy Wallstreeters that there is something wrong with the inequalities in income in America, I also feel that there the OWS people are displaying something of a cavalier attitude towards their own complicity in their downfall. Rather than looking inward to themselves and examining the choices that they have made, they are focused entirely outward on those who have made better choices in regard to the earning potential, and their only thought is to despair that they, who have made a choice that was supposed to elevate them above the greedy money grubbers have found themselves being locked out of the job market completely.
In my view (but who am I?), the cavalier attitude that we had in the 60s and 70s was not natural effect of ‘kids being kids’ but was a function of American prosperity, which kept interest rates low–we could afford it, because we were the richest nation on earth by a long shot–and college cheap. So everyone moved out of the workplace and into college, where they could experiment with drugs and other alternative experiences freely.
But that situation changed when the Berlin Wall collapsed and people around the world started competing for jobs. Soon, China had gutted our manufacturing capacity, and American business people, who had been justly mocked for their narrow-minded behavior in books like The Ugly American
But we didn’t respond the shift that took place with the Fall of the Berlin Wall. Instead, we elected Bill Clinton President, a man who presided over the last great enlargement of economic expansion that we are likely to see for a while in this county (brought about by the invention of the personal computer) but who turned our political culture away from focus on ‘reality’ to an environment where the President’s War Room could react with rhetoric to changing circumstances with rhetoric. There was no underlying ontology in the 90s, and this was due in no small way to the rise of deconstruction in academia, so the President managed to outrun his conservative opponents on the basis that he had a more agile team of rhetoricians.
But it was not just politics where people focused more on their rhetoric than the reality of the situation. American car companies continued to operate all through the 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s, and up until today as though there was no competition in the world and the way things worked in last centuries 00s, 10s, and 20s or in the 40s, 50s, and 60s. But this is demonstrably not the case in a world in which China has taken all of out manufacturing jobs in less than ten year. The situation has changed, and with it our response should change as well.
Alas, I feel as though I’m Cassandra shouting this to a world that doesn’t listen to me (for who am I to be so bold when there are far more famous people who have large followings on both the left and right side of the political aisle?). This is why I pay more attention to business news than I do to political news (which for reasons of my own self-protection I seldom engage in, as I am sure to be misunderstood on both sides of the aisle, as I have been for 30s years now) in the first place and it is why I can profit from my greater knowledge of the facts of culture despite the fact that I don’t participate in the culture from which I profit.
Anyway, this is what I wrote in response to my friend’s naive defense of the Occupy Wall Streeters:
—–
My parents ranted at me when I dropped out of college by failing all my classes, so I have some sympathy for your rebellious position here. And I went to college for the most ridiculous thing imaginable: I have a PhD in Medieval and Renaissance Allegory and Romance from the English Department of the University of Illinois. And I would do it again in a second. But I disagree with you about the worst that can happen here.
It’s not simply a matter of letting students borrow a boatload of money and then allowing them to experiment freely. That might have been okay when you and I were kids, because my private school education (which I failed out of) cost only $7,000/year, which I financed myself through low cost student loans. With college costs rising even faster than healthcare costs and with interest rates at such prohibitive levels, the worst that could happen is bankruptcy, which entails a loss of opportunity, while not allowing you out of your one major expense (as student loans are exempt from default even during bankruptcy restructuring). This is a program that virtually guarantees perpetual slavery to one’s debt and loss of opportunity to travel freely and independently. This is why students in the Occupy Wall Street movement are so upset by the notion that they will be enslaved by debt and will not have the opportunities that we, who grew up before the explosion of tuition prices and student loan interest rates, had.
While I agree with you about the decline of general earning potential, individuals who have learned things that others don’t know will always be able to make money on the basis of the difference between their knowledge versus that of others. The greater the differential, the greater the profit, whether you’re a plumber selling your services to literary critics or (in a far less likely case) whether you’re a literary critic who is selling your services to plumbers.
This means that it no longer enough to have been to college and to have studied the liberal arts, since liberal arts majors need to be retrained after they get out of school into the way that the world actually works and not how those within the ivory tower think is ought to work. In an era where the President seems to be announcing that 9% unemployment is the new norm, liberal arts majors will go without jobs, since there are other in the world who have not been so idealistic and so will not require such (expensive) retraining. It’s no wonder that they are members of the Occupy Wall Street crowd, since they have been the most screwed by the choice they made to study what used to be considered essential to a full life.
But situations change, and when they do, our obligation is not to continue on the paths that have worked for their parents (equality of choice leading to unlimited freedom) but will not work for them (where the exercise of unlimited freedom in education may lead to slavery to debt).
I personally find this sad, because it leaves students in MBA programs, who stand to make the most money (because they have made the best choice in their education as it pertains to making money) feeling as though ethics courses (which are supposed to tie the specialist education back to more general principles) are impediments to getting their share of and increasingly limited amount of pie. In my experience, they generally laugh (and not all that quietly) at their idealistic ethics professors. But the liberal arts bear a lot of responsibly for this state of affairs. After all, they are supposed to be people who look at the “whole” of life, but by excluding that part of life that revolves around the human desire to make money out of the advantages provided by their education (which in their idealism they dismiss as greed) they lose the name of action (to quote some poet of other) and rest firmly within the prison house, not of nature (as another poet said), but within their own misconstrued picture of the world by which they walled themselves off in an ivory tower in the first place.
The world has changed more than you think. In today’s environment, you have to study not just things but the right things, or you will be left behind paying for your education without the means to travel and experiment as we could when we were young, while others who make money from the few jobs remaining in this country (many of which are on Wall Street) after the sweeping away of manufacturing jobs by Chinese firms will still have the opportunity to do just that. This is why, in my humble opinion, it is a mistake for academia to exclude capitalism from the universe. This is like excluding liquor from legality, as they attempted to do in prohibition. It looks great on paper, but the human animal wants what the human animal wants, and no mere law will tamper with the underlying cause of that behavior. There’s more in heaven and earth (to quote my favorite poet again) than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio.
If not, they will suffer. And I’m not saying that if your kids choose correctly that they will be guaranteed an income sufficient to meet their increasingly large needs. There are no silver bullets (never were). But I would say that as a parent, you would do well to educate them about the realities of the world, which are not as we grew up with them in the 70s and 80s and are not as they still remain in my beloved humanities. A humanities education builds character, but it does so in a vacuum created outside of the real world in an ivory tower whose walls are built on principles that are not as real as those inside think they are.
My 2¢.