On the dying idealism--among the youth, and in higher education

The beginning of a new academic year is marked by essays on what we want from higher education.  It is a rare privilege that we have in this profession unlike with others--as in the movie Groundhog Day, it is almost as if we get to redo things year after year hoping that this time it will be different and better.

A couple of days ago, I read one of those essays that was timed for yet another new beginning.  If only I had stopped after reading the essay; instead, I scrolled to read the comments.  My tweet was about the comments!

The comments/discussion in response ... a tragedy and a farce :( http://t.co/X4BW1b4fQz via @chronicle #Faculty pic.twitter.com/z7UM2bW6gM

— sriram khe (@congoboy) August 31, 2015

It is so disappointing that even at a forum like the Chronicle of Higher Education the comments and discussion are as awful as the ones at Faux News and the Rough Limbaugh show.  What prevents people from debating the merits of the argument?

The essay is by Mark Edmundson, whose essays I have shared with students in order to make them think about what they want from higher education,   He writes there:

We’re more and more a worldly, money-based culture geared to the life of getting and spending, trying and succeeding, reaching for more and more. We are a pragmatic people. We do not seek perfection in thought or art, war or faith. The profound stories about heroes and saints are passing from our minds. We are anything but idealists. From the halls of academe, where a debunking realism is the order of the day, to the floor of the stock market, nothing is in worse repute than the ideal.
The passing away of our commitment to ideals should not happen without second thoughts. Young people, who have traditionally been the ones most receptive to ideals, should be able to choose. Do they want to live a wholly practical life in a practical culture? Do they want to seek safety and security and never risk being made fools of? Or do they perhaps want something else? Every generation should be able to hold its own plebiscite on the issue of ideals.

Students go to Harvard these days not driven by ideals but to join the world of high finance.  Even at the "People's Republic" that Berkeley was in the 1960s, there is very little of idealism anymore.  It is the young that we expect to be driven by their ideal visions of the world.  As we grow older, we become less and less idealistic, dulled by the years of experience in the real world.

Edmundson adds:

Maybe we are best off without ideals. Perhaps there can be something bleakly noble in affirming ourselves as fundamentally Darwinian creatures who live to sustain our existences with as little pain and as much pleasure as possible. But is that all there is to life?

Some of us who contemplate about what this life is all about--atheists and true believers alike--would like higher education to have in its structure a place where students will learn to think about that.  Ideal versions of the world are related to what we think about life.  It requires contemplation.  Instead, higher education is increasingly only about information--not about knowledge and wisdom--that will be of practical value to students as they start living their own individual lives in the real world.

We seem to have come to an agreement that life is every man for himself, and every woman, too. The compassionate ideal is so dangerous to the self that it is not safe to put it into even displaced or sublimated form. Pressed to the wall, we affirm faith in individualism, and that is that.

That essay was an excerpt from Edmundson's latest book, which David Brooks refers to in his NY Times column.  Brooks, like many of us, has been going through a midlife crisis and has been all the more driven into understanding aspects of life.  With his own rich liberal education background, Brooks opens his column with:

Just once I’d like to have a college student come up to me and say, “I really wanted to major in accounting, but my parents forced me to major in medieval art.” That probably won’t happen. It always seems to be the parents who are pushing their children in the “practical” or mercenary direction.
These parents are part of the vast apparatus — college résumés, standardized tests, the decline of humanities majors — that has arisen to make our culture more professional and less poetic.

A less poetic world is, of course, not merely about the diminished status of poetry; instead, it is about the loss of idealism and food for the soul that typically are the realms of poetry.  The soul, for us who are secular and atheistic, is not about the soul that might be condemned in purgatory or about the soul that mingles in heaven with a god.  Referring to the soul is nothing but another way, a shorthand reference of sorts, to one of my favorite quests: what is this life all about?  

I do not suffer from any illusion that this year is when higher education will get it right in its Groundhog Day enactment.  But, I am delighted that we get such a new beginning every September.

The emptiness of a secular society ... and education

A couple of years into my teaching, I began to wonder if there was a simple reason why students didn't think of me as an awesome one in the classroom.  Well, assuming they can't ever figure out that I am an intellectual facade covering an idiot!

I wondered if I am not making an emotional connection with them.

I laugh, I kid around, I empathize with the poor and the suffering, I criticize the privileged.  Students know all that.  But, I figured I was not stirring their emotions.

On the other hand, students flocked towards faculty who whip them up into a frenzy with their personal emotions-laded lectures on topics like the messed up environment, the evil corporations, the dirty politicians, the abused women, and more.

Even when I address those issues, I calmly point out to students that the world is a much better place than it ever was on pretty much every one of those issues.  I point to how dirty Los Angeles was, for instance, and how it is cleaner now.  If it were not for corporations, they would not have the smartphones they love.  Politicians have always been dirty--at least they operate in the open now, in contrast to the smoke-filled backrooms.  Women have immensely more opportunities and freedom now compared to even a couple of generations ago.  Yes, there is lots of work to be done on every one of those issues and more, but ...

I fail to stir the emotions within them.  And worse, I point out the bullshit in the claims made by faculty and students.

I have always wondered if my experience in the classroom and the academic environment is no different from the world outside.  Two essays tell me that I am not in the wrong to think that way.

In this essay, in which the author reviews a " short book, adopted from the Henry L. Stimson Lectures that [Michael] Walzer delivered at Yale University in 2013" is this line:

Secular revolutions unwittingly give rise to religious zealotry.  

An interesting hypothesis to work on, right?  The religious fanaticism that we see all around across various countries was borne out of the secular revolutions.

Looking at what began in Israel, India, and (to a lesser extent) Algeria in the middle of the 20th century, Walzer does not ask, "What is to be done?," Lenin’s famous question, but "Why did they do it?" David Ben-Gurion, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Ahmed Ben Bella may have believed that the anticolonial movements they led would help usher in a new society. Instead they prepared the groundwork for clerical authority, unbending dogmatism, and second-class status for women.

 Israel's politics has shifted so much to the religious right that one has to search for remnants of a secular society anymore.  India's religious tensions seem to be reaching newer and newer depths.

Secularists, he argues, lack a thick sense of culture. They are, and for some time will be, unable to provide the sense of belonging and "appeal to history" that Orthodoxy possesses. They have lost whatever hegemony they had.

An op-ed at Project Syndicate is, to a large extent, about these very issues:

The decision to abandon relative peace and prosperity for brutal war and instability may seem irrational. But young people, born and raised in democratic societies, have increasingly been yielding to the appeal of death-dealing groups like the Islamic State, leaving their homes and families to wage jihad in faraway places.Why has democracy lost the allegiance of these restless spirits, and how can it recapture the hearts and minds of others who would follow suit?

I find the answer to be compelling:

democratic ideals and institutions are failing to provide a palpable enough sense of community and purpose – people seek a sense of meaning elsewhere, which in some cases leads them to malevolent causes.

It is easy to get to students' emotions by showing them photos of the polar bear and sweatshops, and it is just as easy to get the youth to get worked up about malevolent causes.  

Defenders of democracy must now determine not only how to create jobs and ensure material prosperity for today’s young people, but also how to feed their souls on the way. If they fail, as we have seen, others will fill the void, potentially with a call for mayhem in the name of messianic futurity.

Interesting, right?  Especially when he writes about feeding their souls?  Deep down, we humans crave for that something that no amount of material comfort can provide us.  A secular, liberal, democracy is failing to address this.  The void that the youth feel is being addressed by those who are devoutly passionate about their causes.  The causes could be as varied as the "secular" fight to save the polar bear, the "religious" fight to save the unborn, or the jihad to defend the honor of a prophet. 

All these do not mean that I am going to change my approach in the classroom, or with my faculty colleagues.  But, I now know all the more that I have set myself up to fail in any popularity contest.

Oh well ... I will comfort my soul by listening to BB King, who died yesterday.

Another atheist advantage: no worries about "rest in peace"

As my cohort gets over the proverbial age hill and begins the descent on the other side, our parents are beginning to rapidly vanish past the horizon.  A couple of days ago, it was the news of the death of a classmate's mother.  She was also a teacher in our school, which makes the death that much more of a real person that we all knew.

Responses on the Google Group soon came in from classmates from wherever we are on this planet, and typically included a note on "may her soul rest in peace."

My response did not include that.

I had other things to write to the friend, but not about his mother's soul.

How could I when I don't believe there is a soul, and for it to find a resting place after the death of a person!

All I know is that we die. Left to itself, the body will start decaying after death. Even from a practical and hygienic perspective, humans had to somehow take care of the dead.  We developed different narratives in order to make sense of life and death and what do with the person who has now been reduced to being referred to as "the body."

When my grandmother died, which was when I was still in high school, I found it bizarre that one moment she was paatti (grandmother) when she breathed her last in the car in which we were taking, and a few minutes after the breath ended, she became "the body" who was being transported to the morgue.  The name, the person, the identity was gone and reduced to "the body" all because she had stopped breathing.  How bizarre is that!

Maybe we reduce the dead person to that kind of a designation because of the emotions that we otherwise have to deal with, when it comes to the post-death procedures?  We are not comfortable with saying "paatti will be  cremated at about 3 pm tomorrow" whereas it is less difficult to deal with "the body will be cremated at 3 pm tomorrow"?  Or in a different culture that buries the dead, to visualize grandma being buried six feet under is more traumatic than if merely "the body" is buried?

Cultures have their own narratives of dealing not only with death but also with the dead.  "Rest in peace" is a part of that narrative.  The imagination here is of a soul that is different from the body, and the worry is about that soul.  If it is Hitler's soul, an overwhelming majority wants that soul to suffer. The narratives about that suffering then paint us pictures of hell and purgatory.  We don't want grandma souls to be anywhere near these horrible place and want those souls to rest in peace.  Nor do we want them to wander around as half-dead, zombies, who might wake up on Halloween and devour our brains.  (Sidebar question: will the souls of vegetarians also stay vegetarians and, thus, not eat human brains?)

Even if I leave my atheist framework aside and work with this "rest in peace," given that the classmate's mother was a Hindu, then is it really appropriate to note "may her soul rest in peace?"

No theologian I am, but that usage sounds a lot more like the purgatory-related narratives of Christianity.  In the Hindu faith, if one sinned a lot, then the "soul" is sent to hell, and is reborn after whatever time it will be in that hell.  Where is the place that the soul is going to rest?  Rebirth is then another chance for the soul to do good and access that other route that takes the soul to heaven.  Of course, Thrishanku is an exception here!

So, how does "rest in peace" really fit into the context of a Hindu's death?

Has "rest in peace" become a phrase that we utter as a reflex response anymore?  Like when people sneeze and we say gesundheit, even if we have no idea that means?  Is "rest in peace" no more than a part of the social behavior, like saying "have a nice day"?  But, when death is so different from everyday happenings, shouldn't our response be a lot more profound than a mere utterance of "may the soul rest in peace?"

Do people, including my classmates, think about all these when they say "rest in peace"?  Should they not think about these, especially when they claim to believe in whatever the narrative is of their choice on what happens after death?

I have profound respect for death; my posts in plenty are evidence of that.  It is one of those rare binary things.  One is either alive or dead.  When things are that definitive, there is something truly awesome.  I suspect that quite a few atheists are like me--we are simply amazed at the power of death.  We live every single day with that thought that death could happen any second.

The wonderful thing is that I don't have to worry about whether or not I will rest in peace.

Atheists or religious, the question is this: are we (our souls) at peace within when alive?