Poverty is an abstraction, even for the poor. But the symptoms of collective impoverishment are all about us. Broken highways, bankrupt cities, collapsing bridges, failed schools, the unemployed, the underpaid, and the uninsured: all suggest a collective failure of will. These shortcomings are so endemic that we no longer know how to talk about what is wrong, much less set about repairing it. And yet something is seriously amiss.Historian Tony Judt, dying of Lou Gehrig's disease, makes a passionate call for a new New Left. [Previously]
Judt also doesn't mention that income/wealth inequality is often a necessary evil, and allows for long-term investments.I don't know, shivohum, the fact that you could just put that out there—without even blinking—kind of underlines Judt's argument about the pure moral vacuum of econometric thought. How much human misery, wasted potential, anger, and hopelessness are elided in that nice, bloodless abstraction "income/wealth inequality [that] allows for long-term investments"?
In a survey of English schoolboys taken in 1949, it was discovered that the more intelligent the boy the more likely he was to choose an interesting career at a reasonable wage over a job that would merely pay well. Today's schoolchildren and college students can imagine little else but the search for a lucrative job.To blame this state of affairs on some vague handwaving about ideals is to miss your own point. "An interesting career at a reasonable wage" is no longer a realistic goal for the average college student. The interesting careers to which a 1949 schoolboy might have aspired — in arts and letters, or the academy, or in public service — are now monopolized by the children of the ruling class who can afford to live off the accumulated wealth of their forebears while earning an entirely unreasonable wage (or no wage, as discussed in the unpaid internship thread of a few days ago). Moreover, even the less interesting but reasonably-paid careers in the middle of the wage spectrum are increasingly disappearing, and those that remain are becoming more difficult and less secure. It should come as no surprise that under these circumstances students are scrambling for the safest places to land they can find, fulfillment be damned. To go into contortions to paint this entirely predictable reaction to increasing material insecurity and loss of job control as symptomatic of some kind of Ayn Randian greed-is-good malaise of the spirit is typical of the weird Boomer antipathy toward economic improvements as the legitimate ends of social movements but a little disappointing nonetheless in an otherwise interesting piece.
"For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose."What the hell does that even mean? That we're desperate, as a nation, to buy Greek national debt in this present crisis, and then foreclose, so coming into possession of historically valuable ancient sites and artifacts, as possible new air base sites in a troubled region? The "pursuit of material self-interest" has typically been understood as the inclination of individuals to amass personal wealth; I don't know how you congregate that to "collective purpose," unless you are trying to make some long winded, tired argument about how evil Coca-Cola, U.S. Steel, General Motors, IBM, Microsoft and the other members of the Standard & Poor 500 are in their dealings with the disadvantaged of the rest of the world, as a result of being the de facto aggregators of the base desires for "material self-interest" of millions of individual and institutional investors.
"In many respects my students are right. It was easy for us—just as it was easy, at least in this sense, for the generations who came before us. The last time a cohort of young people expressed comparable frustration at the emptiness of their lives and the dispiriting purposelessness of their world was in the 1920s: it is not by chance that historians speak of a "lost generation."He and I have no common memory of 1967, 1968, or 1969, or 1970, or 1971, or 1972, if he insists those were "easy for us." I was in school at what is now the University of Memphis, in 1969, in a very troubled city, where my white, bearded face on a city bus late at night, was sufficient reason for 15 or more tired black faces to get up and leave the bus, within 2 blocks, on a desolate section of Poplar Avenue in Midtown Memphis. My draft lottery number on that evening, in a small Kansas county, was 162, but there wasn't a chance anyone with less than a 4F deferment from my county, wasn't going to Vietnam. He and I have no common ground when remembering Newark or Detroit burning, or Kent State, or the day I went to Jackson State, from Memphis, in May, 1970, to see for myself the National Guard marching on a college campus, and firing into the brick of student dormitories, if not the open windows.
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Here's hoping passion talks to rhetoric and they agree to meet with reason and write something sensible.
posted by vapidave at 3:29 AM on April 10, 2010 [2 favorites]