The Rat Trap

Years ago, I wrote a commentary piece that no newspaper wanted to publish.  Maybe in my CV I should have listed the essays that were rejected along with the listing of the published pieces.  I bet that the rejections easily outnumber those that were found fit to be printed!

Anyway, this particular commentary was in the context of the Oscars--the Academy Awards.  The argument that I offered there was this: The Oscars are perhaps the easiest way that we can all understand "market failure."

If the forces of the marketplace were to prevail, then the best picture is the one that earned the most at the box office.  As simple as that.  As this NY Times piece put it more recently, you can rarely have both box office hits and best picture winners at the Oscars.  Rarely ever.  The market, where consumers exercise their preferences, rarely ever picks the best picture.  The market does not always know the best.

I learnt this young--well before I knew anything about the basics of microeconomics--back in the old country.  I loved the movies made by Adoor Gopalakrishnan and Shyam Benegal and ... I didn't watch any of these awesome films in the movie halls because, well, they were never screened there.  The market was saturated with formulaic movies, of which I saw a few too.  These awesome movies that lost out in the marketplace I watched thanks to the government's television channel.  The market, as I later understood in graduate school, knows the price of everything, but never the value of anything.

We need arbiters of quality. Of value. People who know serious shit who can make aesthetic judgments.  Once upon a time, academics were integral to this process.  Not anymore.

In the early 20th century, the critic I.A. Richards already perceived the tension between equality and judgment. “The expert in matters of taste is in an awkward position when he differs from the majority,” he wrote. “He is forced to say in effect, ‘I am better than you. My taste is more refined, my nature more cultured, you will do well to become more like me than you are.’”  By the waning years of the 20th century, professors concluded they needed to reframe their expertise in order to align it with egalitarianism. Therefore, they bend over backward to disguise their syllabi as value-neutral, as simply a means for students to gain cultural or political or historical knowledge. 

We have become wimps. Wusses.  Especially in the postmodernist discourse, we academics have actively pursued the opposite of making aesthetic judgement--we seem to grant every view, every preference, an equal status!  A Marvel comic-book on superheroes is as valuable to humanity as is the Ramayana or Crime and Punishment.

Many professors believe they are trying to contest that intrusion of markets into every sphere of life that goes by the name “neoliberalism.” In my experience, the professors most strident about refusing value judgments are also most committed to resisting neoliberalism. But they can’t have it both ways. 

Indeed.  I am not a huge fan of neoliberalism, nor am I a fierce critic of it either.  Which is also why many of my colleagues view me with suspicion that I am an enemy in disguise.

There’s a basic problem with the capitulation of cultural education to consumer preference. Dogmatic equality tells us: There’s nothing wrong with your taste. If you prefer a steady diet of young adult novels or reality TV shows, so what? No one has the authority to make you feel bad about your desires, to make you think you should want something else.
Such statements sound unobjectionable, even admirable. But if the academy assimilates this view — as it largely has over the past three decades — then a possibility central to humanistic education has been lost. The prospect that you might be transformed, that you might discover new modes of thought, perception, and desire, has been foreclosed.

I am always shocked with the number of students who have ever read any serious piece of literature--in high school literature classes and then in the humanities courses in college.  And then we wonder why the mind has not been opened yet.  Imagine if we had a parallel curriculum in the sciences, where we ... oh well, you get the point, I am sure.

Our work as educators is to show students forms of life and thought that they may not value, and then to help them become the kind of person who does value them. 

In a recent conversation with a guy about my age, I asked him how he became who he is after having grown up in a highly fundamentalist Christian family.  "I came to Eugene and met a whole bunch of people who thought differently," he said.  And then he read Greek and Latin classics in college. Since then, he has charted out for himself who he wanted to be.

David Hume wrote: “Many men, when left to themselves, have but a faint and dubious perception of beauty, who yet are capable of relishing any fine stroke which is pointed out to them.”

I have enormous trust in the arbiters of aesthetics.  I skip movies that Anthony Lane disses, for instance.  I am yet to watch any of the box office champs this past decade.  Yes, dammit, I know better!