What Can’t Be Learned in School (“Working on the World”)

Community Mending, Portland, OR. Katherine is pictured in the bottom left. Used with permission. Subsequent photos by authors. 

*

I realized in my last post that when campaigning for political or practical change, I was acting imagining how someone upright and decent would act. This was about appearances. Are classroom discussions and conversations among friends about appearances too–taking positions and making points that we think look good? Then if we’ve succeeded, we can head home to our dorms satisfied …

There’s some truth to that description. But what about when we are earnest in our studies and our ideas, committed in our desire to work toward a better arrangement of the world? Those feelings aren’t fake. We actually want to do something. But maybe we don’t know what to do, or how. Do I know what it looks like to “do something”? 

Jane Jusko is a friend from high school. I remember her reading Nietzsche, Spinoza, and Rawls as a sophomore in the school library. We would have noisy, involved conversations about the world in the hall. Her sense of things I trust. From our universities halfway across the country from each other, we’ve been speaking about how we love our studies. But we’re struggling to find a sense of meaning in the world we thought that study would bring. 

I: Being Practical 

Jane: Last spring, I took a class examining the history of race and politics in the United States. It was a three-hour seminar, and the discussions in that class were some of the most thoughtful I’ve ever participated in. The group was alight with political imagination. We considered the role of borders in the modern construction of race; we contrasted social movements with electoral structures and their effects on people’s everyday lives; we discussed building community support networks that subverted institutional power. I left feeling like I could mold the world with my two hands. I don’t think that I was the only one.

So what did we do? We went on with our lives as usual, lunching and networking with recruiters from consulting firms and multinational corporations. The decision didn’t seem to have anything to do with morality. We’d all love to save the world, do selfless work for a cause we care about deeply, but as far as we were concerned, that simply wasn’t reality. We could discuss utopia with increasingly abstract academic language. We could associate ourselves with radical ideas proposed by incendiary thinkers. The energy in the room made me feel like I was a part of something bigger, as though those four walls and that circle of desks weren’t the limits of our impact. Something was happening. We were doing something. Participating in that exchange of ideas expanded my worldview and helped me think more deeply about structures I took for granted. But was pushing each other’s thinking all we could ever do with the world? Where did that energy go when we left the classroom?

I ended up with quiet resignation to the idea that having challenging conversations was all that we could do. Late nights discussing power structures with my roommates scratched my itch for a critical reimagining of the world in which I was coming of age. However, that world was too big and our institutions too deeply rooted in society for me to do anything further. As an individual, all that I could do was talk. 

My peers and I bring serious deliberation to the classroom. We handle the issues with critical thought and care. But we struggle to conceptualize the work that we need to do between talking about things and dedicating our lives to them. I believe that there is no impact to be made outside of a total systemic overhaul. Like many of my peers, I don’t see that happening in my lifetime. So, I talk about big ideas with the slight intention of realizing them.

*

I’ve mirrored this phenomenon in my personal life without previously identifying it. I used to discount the work of those who weren’t academically engaged. For most of my childhood, my mother worked at a free clinic. She’s worked in the nonprofit sector since. My mom spent the early months of the pandemic working in a volunteer position with a local foundation addressing community needs such as food insecurity and housing support stemming from the economic effects of COVID. Only recently did I appreciate the time and effort she devoted to serving our community. Maybe my ignorance was due to my age. But as I became aware of the world around me, maybe I was more interested in intellectualizing than engaging it. I have much to learn.

I want to align myself with the right people. It eases my compulsion to do more. I want to be someone who makes change in the world. It’s easy to feel like I am doing that when I fall in with innovative thinkers.

Getting older, I now see the value of the work my mother cherished. But I still struggle to appreciate service work when it doesn’t work toward a complete, systemic overhaul.

My mother wouldn’t consider herself a Marxist or an anarchist. She’s a woman who loves her community. But her kind of love is inseparable from many radical schools of thought. bell hooks writes that

[t]he willingness to sacrifice is a necessary dimension of loving practice and living in a community. … Every day, individuals who are not rich but who are materially privileged make the choice to share with others. Some of us share through conscious tithing (regularly giving a portion of one’s income), and others through a daily practice of loving kindness, giving to those in need whom we randomly encounter. Mutual giving strengthens community.

bell hooks, All About Love (New York: Harper Perennial, 2000), pp. 142-3

hooks’ tracing of the loving community practice of mutual giving and sacrifice is something with which my mother would readily align. 

II: Life without the Full Picture

Katherine: Classroom theories aren’t really helpful for telling us what to do with ourselves. Take even Marxism—an “activist philosophy.” As I was just starting to have questions about the world, Marxism made me think deeply about economic relations. It left me concerned about the world and desiring to be part of a cause. But which? I wrote long papers on the development of Marx’s ideas throughout his life, spent my senior year of high school organizing a (sizable) discussion group on capitalism. But what was there to do beyond this? The most I tended to manage was donating money to people who were, apparently, doing something (even if it was hard to express what). There was something unhelpful in how I approached my studies and dealt with my longing, but I had a hard time making sense of my social-political orientation. 

Reading through some of David Graeber’s writings last year, I saw that he expressed a similar sentiment about Marxism. He wrote that, for centuries, the Marxist academic has been “doing intellectual battle at conferences in expensive hotels, and trying to pretend all this somehow furthers revolution” (p. 7). I was caught by David Graeber’s explanation of why this was what Marxist academics do as he drew a distinction between Marxism and anarchism (p. 6):

1. Marxism has tended to be a theoretical or analytical discourse about revolutionary strategy.

2. Anarchism has tended to be an ethical discourse about revolutionary practice.

What I seek doesn’t have to be anarchism, and it doesn’t have to exclude Marxism. But the difference between a discourse that is “theoretical or analytical” and one that is “ethical” speaks to me. The difference is in the perspective one takes. Perhaps the former would be useful if I’m imagining what sort of society should be set up for everyone or how things now need to change. But an “ethical” discourse seems more situated in life. Thinking ethically, rather than strategically or theoretically, is how we can think through responsibility and work on a scale more everyday than complete, systemic overhaul. 

In a discipline like political theory, it seems fitting to think theoretically or analytically, and in university we should learn what the world looks like for a great many people. But when I’m trying to find my role in the world—forming clear and deep sentences in which “I” is the felt subject—Marxism just isn’t sufficient.

*

My (Katherine's -ed.) first Starting Out in Philosophy post; my library copy of Fragments in a photo sent to a friend last school year

It’s interesting to think about what it means for someone to be acting ideologically. People who subscribe to some “-ism” are often labeled as ideological. They have boldface ideas in their minds about how society should be. Maybe they even work on them. Yet you (Jane -ed.) described your mother as ideological too, even though she may not have had an idea about the perfect way to construct society. Still, she’s working on the world. It’s meaningful and real to her and to others, not some boldface abstraction.

*

How can I work on the world? Recently, I’ve been thinking of Diogenes the Cynic. He would eat in the market and sleep outside in a tub, flaunting ancient Greek conventions. I’ve thought of him as someone who, thinking conventions were often foolish, challenged people to defend their beliefs by providing the shock of someone doing things deeply unconventionally. My college co-op—once a locus of sixties and seventies counterculture—did something similar. It vaunts walking around nude in the co-op house and absurd, Dada-like party themes that try to cynically point out the meaninglessness of taking yourself too seriously.

Yet I wonder what room there is for not only pointing out things that are meaningless but for finding and creating warm, meaningful practices. Being a steward of the tradition of the co-op was, ironically enough, one source of meaning for me. I’ve written before about chores as another (in the previous hyperlink -ed.).

As readers of this mini-series know, I’ve taken a gap year away from college. Now I’m living in an intentional community in Portland and sharing a household with people coming out of homelessness, thinking about and experimenting with community food purchasing, hospitality, neighborliness, and many other things.

*

Jane: What should I be aiming for? I don’t know how the world will be. But defeatism about working on the world is no solution.

Sitting in Chicago in my dorm and reflecting on my conversation with Katherine, I think I should abandon my need for a rigid view of what society will look like if I am to “succeed,” and perhaps I should stop looking at progress as a paradigm of success and failure. Maybe it’s even the fear of failure that leads to feelings of defeat.

I’m still learning and growing into the way that academic ideologies fit into my everyday life. There are realms of the world I don’t dare try to explain, but perhaps I need to allow myself to approach them with an open mind and heart nonetheless. Maybe that’s simply how we learn and how we grow. Maybe that’s how we experiment practically in the first place.

When we trust in ourselves and approach our experiments fearlessly, what becomes of political imagination? Do we need to be so anxious about “how the world will be” if we bring love to our fight against injustice?

~

This is an installment of Into Philosophy.