Like a governor on the stump, I feel your pain. You’re young, completing your education, and preparing to launch into the world. Yet while so many quislings avert their eyes, you refuse to look away from the rigged game, the systemic oppression, and the false consciousness.
You have seen enough to appreciate the need for radical change. You have knowledge, ambition and sympathy. But for all that, you lack wisdom, perspective and empathy.
Edmund Burke understood this undergraduate euphoria. “In the morning of our days, when the senses are unworn and tender,” Burke remarked, “how lively at that time are our sensations, but how false and inaccurate the judgements we form of things.” Billy Joel said it best in his 1976 song “Angry Young Man”:
There's a place in the world for the angry young man / With his working-class ties and his radical plans… And he's never been able to learn from mistakes, / So he can't understand why his heart always breaks. / And his honor is pure and his courage as well, / And he's fair and he's true and he's boring as hell.
On the other hand, no one could call your professors boring. They hold auditoriums rapt for hours, resolving dialectics and dispensing witticisms. Should you not look to them for guidance?
But academics have a mixed record at best. Indeed, the 20th century’s foremost luminaries had front-row seats for the worst despots in history. They rose not to condemn, but to applaud.
Consider George Bernard Shaw. He brought a weighty “play of ideas” to the stage in works like “Pygmalion,” earning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925. Yet the allegedly thoughtful Shaw met Joseph Stalin in 1931, then spent the rest of his life praising the man who launched the Holodomor.
Likewise, Martin Heidegger’s 1927 “Being and Time” shook the foundations of Western philosophy, a book culminating with a call for individuals to live “authentic” lives. Heidegger would express his most authentic German self by joining the Nazi party in 1933.
British economist Joan Robinson erected a pillar of modern economics by introducing monopsony to the profession at large. Yet she spent the final decades of her life visiting China and writing paeans to Mao Zedong.
Whether your beliefs today will eventually garner acclaim or ignominy comes down to one question: Did you humbly seek truth, guided by the great lights that preceded you? Or did you feign certainty in your own prejudices by filtering every fact through ideology? While nothing guarantees you escaped the latter, three habits make the former more likely.
First, imbibe the Western canon. Start with Genesis. And before dismissing it as Bronze Age myth, turn to chapter three. Uncomfortable questions quickly appear: How hard, really, have you fought against your worst instincts? Did you accept responsibility for your actions, or offer lame excuses?
Turning from the personal to the political, Thucydides’ “History of the Peloponnesian War” offers a surer template for international relations than any textbook. This record of Athens reminds us that reckless majorities all too easily vote to betray their own allies and principles, bringing about their own demise at the acme of civilization.
Move forward more than a millennium, and Shakespeare will reward you with a deeper appreciation of the human condition. Macbeth, for example, warns that a leader’s noble rhetoric cannot efface his sordid ambition, that violence begats violence, and that corruption rots souls and polities alike.
Instead of remaining ensconced in your own preferences, choose to wrestle with our tradition. Like Jacob you will emerge with a limp, having lost the capacity to hold forth with perfect confidence. Instead, you will carry the burden of knowing how much we owe our predecessors. Great works endure today because of “a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” Who are you to reject it?
Second, interrogate your own motivations with all possible severity. Before kicking off a college tour with a “land acknowledgement,” ask what really moves you: genuine contrition for the crimes of men you cannot name, or the thrill of performative masochism? When you pointedly refer to some group by the latest approved jargon, does concern for the oppressed really move you, or a desire to signal your own group loyalty? When you denounce wealth at whatever arbitrary level you deem excessive, are you expressing solidarity with the working class, or resentment for the successful?
Delay these questions too long, and your moral credibility will decay to that of Arundhati Roy, the gifted Indian novelist with the temerity to castigate Gandhi, but incapable of criticizing Hamas. Imitate Roy if you must, but the day will arrive when you realize you were never Jean Valjean, but Inspector Javert, not Salman Rushdie, but Ayatollah Khomeini. Far better to emulate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who looked back in horror at his own failings, saying, “In my most evil moments I was convinced I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments.”
Third, acknowledge the paucity of your “lived experience.” Whatever philosophical rigor once attended Wilhelm Dilthey’s notion of Erlebnis, today that hackneyed phrase usually justifies insipid narcissism. But a literal interpretation still holds value: you have more years ahead of you than behind. A lot can happen between youth and middle age.
Perhaps you will take a principled but unpopular stand in public. On that day, you will learn that censors and braying mobs cannot deliver justice. Or spend time living in a developing country where you can taste pollution in the air, smell the lack of infrastructure in every ditch, and see the degradation imposed by ubiquitous corruption. Upon returning home your own society’s failures might well appear quaint in contrast. You will certainly witness friends and family losing their jobs, marriages, and lives to addictions of all kinds. After that, harmless vices will no longer appear quite so benign.
Instead of a life spent chasing the next cheap dopamine hit, you can strive for something beyond immediate gratification. You can craft a life that echoes Petrarch’s iambic pentameter instead of the structureless vomit that passes for modern poetry. In a society of refuse piles, you can build a Parthenon.
How to build it? By contributing to groups between the individual and the state you seek to reform. Honest labor delivers the material means to support yourself while also providing others with something of value.
Still, for all its practical efficacy, the private sector cannot deliver every desirable good. Even more reason to contribute to your community. Countless civic, nonprofit and religious organizations would welcome your selfless exertions. Most of all, devote yourself to family, because families are the salient unit of every civilization.
I hope you succeed, that you put away childish things and pick up responsibilities in your home, locale and workplace. Do that, and you will find the courage to admit that no one has the solutions, least of all you.
Yes, societies rife with hypocrisy are ugly, but so are those suffused with nihilism. True, state violence is awful, but relinquishing the capacity for it might lead to something far worse. Rights are sacred, but so are obligations.
So, fight the good fight. Just remember to leaven your certainty with humility, your accusations with inquiries, and your grievance with gratitude. God speed and good luck.
James Herndon earned his Ph.D. in Economics at the University of Alabama. He currently works as a consultant in Birmingham, Ala.
The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of 1819 News. To comment, please send an email with your name and contact information to [email protected].
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