What in the hell …

My mother-in-law Faith named her two daughters Angelica and Christiana. It probably doesn’t need to be said that she’s very religious. At some point when Angelica and I were living at Faith’s house, a friend of ours, meeting Faith for the first time, remarked “oh, you have a pretty name.” She replied, “Thank you. I wasn’t so happy with it for all those years I was agnostic.” Surprised, Angelica asked Faith for clarification, and found out that Faith had been an agnostic from the age of 15 to about 30. She had wrestled with her religious beliefs in part because she thought that if she didn’t believe in god then her father had wasted his life as a lutheran pastor. She asked Angelica, “don’t you feel like my life is wasted if there’s no god?” or something to that effect. Angelica laughed and said no, that she didn’t feel like Faith’s life’s value rests on her christianity or her work with her church.

I’d like to draw a parallel between this and beliefs about the importance of what goes on in some academic settings, often in terms which are spoken of with capital letters – Theory, Philosophy, Knowledge, Thought, etc. It’s a desire to feel like what one and one’s loved ones have spent their time on is worth something, that’s it not time wasted. An understandable urge, but not the most helpful if it’s a retroactive assessment rather than one that impacts how one behaves. Even if it impacts how one behaves it’s not at all clear that it’s a good thing. I nearly ruined a number of friendships and my relationship with my partner by dedicating myself to The Cause when I worked as an organizer, not to mention keeping hours and a level of stress which surely impacted my health. I’m one quite susceptible to the church of higher callings, and the higher calling is all over my new workplace, ‘the academy’. Not that it’s not good work. It is. Kind of. But what isn’t? I mean, yeah, building bombs or torturing prisoners, that’s fucked up, but aside from a specific set of jobs in social control, aren’t most jobs at least a little bit okay, if we think about them in the right light?

That is, one can always point out something good that one does. If people need to do that in order to keep on keeping on then more power to them. The really annoying part is when the importance of the work is taken to be Something That Matters to other people: defending democracy, enlightening the masses, etc. It’s just not true most of the time (and my own output here isn’t exempt from this), or at a minimum it can’t be just assumed to be the case. Not to attack anyone of course. I just want to think this through because I don’t want to fall into what for me is an old trap. More than that, though, I think there’s another element and one I need to think about more.

It seems to me that in at least the sections of the academy that I’m familiar with, the idea that we’re ‘political’ by doing these particular jobs is not only a belief people hold to feel good about themselves. I think it’s also an important belief in keeping the workplaces functioning. One version of this that I used to run into in undergrad in philosophy was the idea that knowledge and mastery thereof is valuable as such. Sure, in the sense of ‘we care about it’. But beyond that, I’m not sure. Case in point: memorizing a phonebook. Good for you if you do so, but what else hangs on that? The basic point is very simple, when one is told “what we’re doing is important” the question has to be “important for whom and according to what set of values?” If answer is anything but “to us according to what we want to/like to do”, I start to wonder. Not reject prima facie, but wonder. Like I said, it’s not that the ‘what I do I important’ thing is particularly pernicious necessarily. But it is more problematic when it becomes a matter of ‘what I do is more important than what other people do’. I suspect that one source of this urge comes from having lefty views but not knowing what to do with them or having anything to do with them that one feels particularly satisfying. The urge, unmet, builds up in a classic Freudian sense of cathexis. Making radical gestures etc (and I don’t exempt my own) releases some of this build up. Ugh.

This may just be my own urge to deflate everything, to make everything into a matter of simple practical concerns, but … it seems to me one important goal (at least for me personally, to avoid the Scylla and Charybdis of The Cause and depression) is to try to make one’s own means into relative ends, to make what one does be satisfying enough to keep on keeping on, but to not become satisfying enough that one feels like everything is okay. I’m not clear on what it would take to actually do that, though. Maybe someone should write a communist self-help book…