is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Philosophy at a party.
Conversation with a stranger from last weekend's party:
She: So it�s summer, so you�re not working.
Me: Well, summer is when I actually work on my own stuff, so it�s kind of harder.
She: Oh, so you�re getting ready for next year�s classes?
Me: Oh, no. I�m doing my own writing and research.
She: So you�re writing a textbook?
Me: No, I�m writing a book that isn�t necessarily for a class.
She: What�s that for?
Me: It�s what I do� contribute to a conversation in progress, between scholars and other people interested in the field.
She: Who will read it?
Me: Other scholars, and maybe some people outside academia too.
She: Do you have to write a book?
Me: It is why I got into this business, to do my own work. It�s also a required part of the job. So, if I want to get tenure I have to do it. But I would do it even if I didn�t have to.
She: What is the book about?
Me: There has been a trend in recent years to deal with certain kinds of violence and international crime by proposing forgiveness as a way to move forward, like in South Africa. My book is about the limits to that as a goal. Not because I�m against forgiveness, but because I don�t think asking people to silence their justified resentment at bad treatment will actually make reconciliation possible. So my book is about why it is important to pay attention to resentment if you really want people who have been in conflict to try to live together.
She: Oh.
[silence.]
Me: Yeah. It�s not exactly the best party topic.
Multiply that conversation by 5.
I mention this because lately I�ve been noticing that every single portrayal of a professor or a graduate student on television or in movies is of a deeply undersocialized creep. Or a sociopath.
So, whenever I have the above conversation, I am always trying to balance between not being boring to someone who is at a party and has, understandably, no wish to talk about resentment or genocide... (There is always the possibility that someone will want to talk about that� and then that door can open.) (But it is also the case that oftentimes I really don�t want to talk about that at a party!) �so, I�m trying to balance between saying too much and saying not enough and then coming off as if I were assuming other people aren�t smart enough to understand what I�m doing. I am never assuming that. But people often have strange ideas about what people who are philosophy professors are like. I would also like to contribute to buildling a world where people don�t think humanities professors are weirdos with a lot of vacation time.
In graduate school I was so tired of other academics who always assume that everyone in the world is fascinated by their arcane scholarly pursuits that I regularly avoided saying anything about my work to my non-academic (and even my academic) friends. And then one night I learned that a couple of them felt like maybe I thought they weren�t smart enough to follow what I was doing. TOTAL PLAN BACKFIRE on my part. So I started saying more about what I�m doing. And sometimes that leads to good conversations. But, admittedly, most of what I write about is what most people would (for good reason) file under the category: depressing. You know, genocide, oppression, resentment, all that. Of course, I�m always looking at these things for the sake of other things, like reconciliation, responsibility, justice� and to me that is not depressing. But on the way to talking about that stuff, you have to deal with some pretty depressing facts. There certainly are things I know about what human beings have done to other human beings that I sometimes wish I could un-know. But it doesn�t make me take up another field of inquiry, so I guess I have found it all to be worth it in the longrun.
To me it is really, REALLY important that I have a life where I interact, regularly and not superficially, with lots of people who aren�t academics. So, over time, it has become more and more strange for me to see how little understanding there is outside of academia of what the academic life is. That is part of what fuels those TV and movie portrayals. It also contributes to the bizarre ideas people have about teacher pay rates and �ivory tower� stuff, and the current obsession with putting a dollar value on scholarly work.
Of course, lots of academic types are NOT HELPING AT ALL in the way they talk to people outside of academia. But it�s not just because there are a lot of people who haven�t quite figured out how to communicate with a general audience that academia is misunderstood. (Though I sometimes wonder: wow, all of these people decided to become TEACHERS and yet they can�t quite convey what they are working on to a person who hasn�t read all the same books?) Being in the field of philosophy in particular seems to be a conversation stopper. It happens like this:
He: What do you do for a living?
Me: I�m a college professor.
He: Oh! What do you teach?
Me: Philosophy
At this point in the conversation one of three things happens. He says �oh, I guess I can�t talk to you!�, goes silent, or asks what kind of philosophy I teach (this last one keeps a conversation alive). But it is surprising how often I get the �I guess I can�t talk to you!� answer� which is almost always meant in jest, but also says something about what philosophy means to people at this particular moment in time.
It is interesting to me that philosophy could simultaneously have so much and so little power in our current society. So many people are intimidated by its mere mention. At the same time so many people are sure it has nothing to offer them or the larger society. When they are sure that it has little to offer it is because they either don�t think �abstract� ideas matter or don�t think things that don�t generate a great amount of capital (aka money) matter.
But almost every single thing that really matters to someone living in a modern industrialized society started as someone�s �abstract� idea, or someone�s ideal or goal. We would be nowhere without philosophy. I wonder why we seem to have lost the sense that such pursuits matter.
Another way the conversation often goes: I describe what I�m writing, the person I�ve just met assumes my goal is to get a job �doing something,� aka working for a government in the midst of political reconciliation, or working for an international criminal tribunal. I make it clear that those are not my goals. And then we are left in the silence that surrounds the life of the mind.
I always do add my pitch for the life of the mind. If we start valuing only things that create more money, we�ll won�t leave space for the idealist who envisions something that might transform the world in a way that totally transcends how much money it might make. What if we lived in a world where human rights and equality did not exist because they aren�t �worth� anything? What if we lived in a world where indie music and all kinds of poetry and literature did not exist because they do not make money? Also, we have no way of knowing which of the �abstract� ideas being worked through intensely right now by scholars and other thinkers (inside and outside of academia), whether in the form of philosophy or literature or science or art, are going to end up making the world a better place, or a more fun place, or a more fair place. But I am fairly confident that deciding that money is the only way to gauge something�s value is only going to get us more global warming, financial collapse, unfair distribution of global wealth, bad design of nuclear power plants in earthquake zones, bad art or no art, uninteresting music, and so on.
This conclusion has nothing to do with whether someone at a party should be interested in my book about resentment! Like I said, a party is often exactly the place where no one should want to talk about such things. A party is for fun, hilarity, dancing, enjoying, and conversing about other things!
This has all just been a set of cursory observations about the place of ideas in our culture, and how that �place of ideas� sometimes affects me, having chosen to have my living be what I would call: the life of the mind.
12:34 p.m. - June 07, 2011
cheryl - 2011-06-07 15:57:51
I think people are intimidated or embarrassed because they assume you are smarter than they are or they believe that you've chosen a more thoughtful life than they have. One of the ways they deflect their anxiety is to assume you are condescending to them. They dismiss your choice as irrelevant in the modern world (so they don't feel quite so lame). Maybe rather than telling people what you are working on (which seems abstract and outside of the common experience) you could instead share your goals/aims for the work that you do (as you have done in this post). It might be easier for people to relate to the idea of an end product, for instance, that you want to continue a conversation about something with the aim of reaching a solution to a tangible problem.
p.s. I'd talk to you at a party ;-)
-------------------------------
js - 2011-06-08 18:33:41
good point, cheryl. i'll have to figure out how to maneuver the conversation away from the unavoidable "what do you do for a living" to "what matters to you" or something like that... and i know you would talk to me, for sure!
-------------------------------
Xina - 2011-06-08 19:18:14
This is great! Thanks for this. When I tell people I study Genocide, they tend to say things like "Whoa! That's dark! How do you sleep at night?" Or they "reveal" to me information about something they think I should study... perhaps that I've "never" heard about... like a recent woman's "revelation" about the slaughter of Native Americans.
-------------------------------
Michael Wharton - 2011-06-08 22:29:04
I am often OBITR. The initials were invented by my family as a way of reminding myself and my cousins about the Lessons in public without involving others - it stands for Only Black In The Room.
One Lesson (what my parents, uncles and aunts called their system for survival in 1950s America as black Caribbean graduate students) was about managed social expectations. One assume the worst without accepting that it must be so. This removes any angst about the bad acts of other people or curiosity about why they are so. That leaves you free to Show and Prove - the second Lesson.
I still get a rash when I hear this phrase, it was said so often to me a child. To my parents, it meant that the only way to win in 50s era America was to do better than all the Americans because of inconvenient historic timing. For you, this might mean showing and proving that serious women who think for a living are also chill chicas who can navigate a social gathering with ease. The sentence/punch line of this, oft repeated at family gatherings is, "You're so different than all the," awkward pause ensues. (Sorry for the novel, your post sparked a flashback.)
-------------------------------
js - 2011-06-09 23:14:13
Good points, Michael. You wouldn't believe (or, I guess, you would) how often I catch people being surprised that I am smart (you know, because I'm female and attractive). And so on.
I just spent a day at an International Development Ethics conference and learned a lot about what non-Western women think the lives of western women are like. No sexism or racism or material deprivation here (they think)! (So it's good to be involved in conferences like this, for all sides to see some truths about each other.)
-------------------------------
Vladimir Estragon - 2011-06-11 05:54:02
Forget about parties, which are a lost cause for me, how do your students relate to the "real" scholarly work you are doing, Jill? I spend most of my class time trying to persuade my students that there is some value in knowing how to write a coherent sentence. I can shove Salinger and Hemingway down their throats and get a discussion started at least part of the time, but if I started talking about Samuel Beckett and the work I do on my own, I'd have a room full of blank faces.
-------------------------------
js - 2011-06-15 14:23:51
i teach one class yearly where i tie certain readings to the work of scholars who i then have visit the college, teach the class for a day, and then give a public talk on their work. it helps students see that the life of the mind is, well, a life, and that these works are written by people with whom they can converse, etc. ....every now and then it makes sense to talk about my own work but, to be honest, i don't really aim to get the students directly involved with my work... unless i happen to be teaching a course where it makes sense to do so. however, i do often employ students as research assistants, who help me with my work while advancing their own.
-------------------------------
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
|
